


Let's Just Take a Day

by onward_came_the_meteors



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bruce Banner & Tony Stark Friendship, Chaptered, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Deaf Clint Barton, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, POV Third Person, Post-Avengers (2012), Ratings: PG, Sick Bruce Banner, Sick Characters, Sick Clint Barton, Sick Natasha Romanoff, Sick Steve Rogers, Sick Tony Stark, Sickfic, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, The Avengers Are Good Bros, The Avengers Need a Hug, sick thor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:21:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 56,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25903507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: While out on a mission, the Avengers get exposed to an alien virus.S.H.I.E.L.D. sets them up with a quarantine, assuring them that the effects will pass soon enough—and besides, it's not like three of them can even get sick.They should have known it wouldn't be that simple.
Comments: 47
Kudos: 164





	1. You'll Love It; It's Like Candy Land

  
  


It was just another day in New York, or at least the kind of day where the Avengers—still getting used to that name after defeating the Chitauri a few months ago—were getting called to assemble after reports of a “strange, muddy, alien” were bombarding every station and S.H.I.E.L.D. channel in the area.

And after an hour of fighting this thing, Steve had decided that those reports were pretty accurate. 

Coming to a halt on a street corner, he shook a glop of the thick substance off the sleeve of his suit and looked around with a hand shielding his eyes. The block wasn’t in perfect condition, but they’d managed to herd most civilians out and keep an alien blast from taking out a chain restaurant, and there didn’t seem to be any sign that the creature had headed this way…

The coms crackled in his ear: “East is clear, anybody got eyes on the target?” Natasha’s voice, slightly out of breath.

Steve pressed a finger to his ear. “No, this area’s ruled out too; Clint, Tony, either of you see anything?” He figured that out of everyone on the team, those two were the most likely to have an aerial view.

Tony’s voice in his ear now: “It’s not in Central Park, I can tell you that much, but there’s so much of this stuff everywhere that it’s blocking JARVIS’s sensors. Remind me why the bad guys always attack in New York again?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Natasha said wryly. “Maybe it has something to do with the thousand-foot tower with the giant Avengers symbol on it.”

“Not nice, Romanoff.”

Steve shook his head and began heading up the next street, past hastily abandoned cars and enormous piles of the goopy alien muck covering doorways and fire hydrants in a thick brown ooze. As he ran, he had to be careful to avoid it dripping from awnings overhead.

_As soon as this is over, I don’t care who wants to debrief us, I’m going straight to the shower._

After a few more minutes of scanning the streets for the source of all this muck, Nat’s voice staticked out of the coms again.

“I found Clint and Thor. They’ve got our target cornered.” 

“Where?” In the distance, Steve could hear the rumble of thunder, which was followed by an answering roar from the Hulk. 

“In front of the shoe store where you discovered the existence of Crocs.”

“Okay, you didn’t need to mention that part.” Steve ignored Tony’s shout of laughter in his ear as he ran past a few more streets. “Let’s keep the focus on the mission, shall we?”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

The coms were silent for the rest of the way to said shoe store—seriously, Nat was a secret agent, hadn’t she been trained to give information in a more direct way?—which was almost unrecognizable now, since it and the entire street around it was completely covered in the muddy substance.

At least he knew he was in the right place.

_The Norse god and the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent with a bow and arrow kind of give it away, too._

Thor spotted him first and gave a wave, his other hand occupied with pressing his hammer down onto the alien creature, effectively pinning it in place. Even if it had somehow managed to wriggle free, Clint was there with an arrow trained on its blobby face.

Steve slowed as he got closer to them, stopping a short distance away. Any closer, and his boots would’ve been engulfed in the sticky muck, and judging from the grimace on Clint’s face, that was not a desirable situation.

“Captain Rogers!” Thor greeted him. “As you can see, I have captured the beast. I did warn you all that the Avengers weren’t really needed here.”

“You weren’t sayin’ that five minutes ago when it was eating your cape,” Clint muttered under his breath.

Steve nodded wearily. Now that the adrenaline from active battle was wearing off, every muscle in his body was feeling the exhaustion of the day. Sprinting at top speed through the streets of New York, heaving the shield at sentient piles of mud, diving for cover at every spray the creature shot at them… and it hadn’t helped that an explosion from the labs had woken up everyone in the tower at three-forty-five A.M last night (Tony and Bruce _had_ promised that it was an accident, but Steve still wasn’t sure how you could make something called a “rapid particle-dispersing generator” and not expect it to do exactly what it did). “Any ideas where this thing came from?”

“Space,” Thor said.

“Space,” Clint repeated almost immediately.

“Thanks.” Steve looked over the creature, which was oozing defeatedly onto the pavement. Now that he was up close, he could see that it wasn’t exactly a sentient pile of mud; there were two eyes and amorphous lumps that could be limbs. Every so often a wide, toothless, mouth opened and shut with a _glorp._ “Does anyone have a plan for what to do with it, or are we waiting for the others to—”

He trailed off as Iron Man came soaring through the air toward them, dodging and looping this way and that to avoid the Hulk chasing after him. After a moment, Steve realized that Tony was actually trying to _guide_ the Hulk, dangling like bait above his head and zooming out of the way before he could get smashed by a green fist. A moment later, Natasha landed on the street on Steve’s left, looking inscrutable as always even though the only possible way she could have gotten there was by leaping off a balcony three stories up.

“I guess you’ve got this under control,” Nat said, rising up into a standing position. A few feet away, a crash sounded as the Hulk pushed off a fire escape to lunge at Iron Man, who twisted out of the way just in time.

“I guess so,” Steve said. 

Iron Man came down to hover above the others; Tony’s voice out of breath and echoey inside the helmet. He indicated with a red-and-gold finger toward the Hulk. “He’s like a cat with a laser beam, I swear.” A second later, proving his point, a large green arm came up to grab the suit. Tony managed to avoid it, but the Hulk’s resulting splash into the mud sent a wave of it spraying all over him.

“What _is_ this stuff? Disgusting.”

“Glad for your input, Tony,” Steve said, wiping muck out of his eyes. “Do you have any actual theories of value to offer here?”

There was a metallic whirring noise as the suit turned its head from the alien blob to the spatters of muck painting the streets, buildings, and Avengers and back to Steve. “This thing looks like Gloppy from Candy Land.”

“Remind me why we keep him around again?” Clint asked.

Natasha shook her head regretfully. “The ad said he was supposed to be a genius.” 

More whirring as Iron Man moved a hand over his arc reactor. “Well, that’s just hurtful.” He flew in a circle around the alien creature; probably JARVIS was doing some sort of scan. “So obviously if this thing can regulate the rigidity of its own cell structures—and once he transforms back, I am going to have to double-check with Bruce about this because I’m pretty sure since it can’t spontaneously alter its own makeup on a molecular level, some of the compounds would still have to be dissolved solids at best—it sort of begs the question of how you’re planning to get it out of here.” He looked at the Hulk hopefully, but the Hulk just gave a snort and sat down on the ground.

Thor raised his eyebrows. “Do you mean to say that you don’t have any kind of bilayer lipid-alignment stabilizers on Earth?”

“I think it’s pretty safe to say we don’t,” Steve answered.

“Interesting. This should do until I can contact Asgard, though.” Thor shoved his hammer more firmly into the gooey flesh (?) of the alien creature, an expression of concentration spreading across his face. A dark cloud passed briefly over the sun and thunder grumbled in the distance—earning a growl from the Hulk—and an instant later, the hammer was glowing and crackling with lightning that formed a sort of crisscrossing web encasing the creature.

Natasha nodded appreciatively. “Nice.” 

Tony made another circle, inspecting the setup from all sides. “I feel like you’re holding out on us, Sparky. How come you never tell us about stuff like this until we’re in a fight?”

“If I told you everything mortals didn’t already know, your tiny brains would explode and I'd have to deal with all of you running around and…” Thor gestured with his free hand. “... panicking.”

“Good to know you’re got our best interests at heart. “ As Tony flew back around, the toes of the suit skimmed the top of the muck oozing out into the street, sending it spraying over Clint and Nat.

Tony didn’t appear to notice what he’d done, but the irritated look on Clint’s face quickly turned to a sneaky one as he calmly sheathed his bow, leaned down, scooped up a handful of soft, squishy mud, and hurled it directly at Iron Man’s helmet.

_SPLAT._

Steve winced— _ooh, right in the eyes—_ but couldn’t stop a smile from cracking across his face as Tony whipped his head around. 

“I’m sorry, are we five?” Mud dripped off the helmet. “You know what, it’s on. You just made a bad, bad, decision, Barton.”

Clint was laughing, but it turned almost immediately to an “oh, _shit_!” as clumps of muck shot toward him. He held up his quiver to protect himself, and it did take most of the hit, but the gooey substance was still all over his legs and boots.

“All right, that’s enough!” Steve assumed his “captain” voice, lowering his shield to his side. All eyes—even the Hulk’s—flicked to him. “Despite what most of you might think, this mission isn’t over yet, and I’d rather not have us compromising our professionalism entirely by the time S.H.I.E.L.D. shows up.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Natasha sneaking around the edge of the circle of Avengers. Everyone else’s gaze was still on him, and he knew all too well that Nat could be extremely quiet when she wanted to be. No, as long as he kept talking, she wouldn’t be noticed.

“There is nothing unprofessional about releasing a few celebratory impulses,” Thor protested. His magic lightning web sparked in agreement. “On Asgard, we often do this at the end of a triumphant battle.”

“I don’t think that excuse will go over well with Nick Fury,” Steve pointed out. Natasha was nearly in position now, reaching down and scooping up a ball of ooze in each hand. 

“Gosh, Rogers, when did you become such a spoilsport? Is that the attitude you get after seventy years on ice or were you like that bef—” Tony was cut off mid-sentence as Natasha launched two mud balls, spun downward into a crouch, and was somehow up again with more in barely an instant.

The circle exploded. Steve ducked behind his shield, just as much to hide his smile as to protect himself from the mud splatters. Clint’s shoulder and left side were now dripping with muck, and a strangled noise escaped him before he started yelling “traitor!” at Natasha. Thor had burst out laughing, hardly noticing the mud sliding down his armor. Tony wheeled around in the Iron Man suit, protesting in half-formed sentences like “what was—where did—Natasha did—what—” and the Hulk—

_Oh, shit. The Hulk._

About fifteen minutes later, all six Avengers were completely and utterly covered in mud, even Natasha and Clint, who may have been hard to catch but couldn’t avoid the Hulk’s extremely messy rampage. Unfortunately for the Avengers Tower’s showers and washing machines, the whole team was extremely competitive and had gotten into the mud fight without a second thought. 

Picking up his shield from where he’d dropped it by a fire hydrant after darting away from a flying Iron Man coming at him, Steve turned back to the group, who were now resembling a collection of chocolate-covered figures more than anything else. “Anyone else think we’re ready for a truce now? For real this time?”

“I don’t know, Rogers,” Natasha said, emerging from behind an abandoned car. “How are we going to trust you again?”

Steve grinned. That was going to be secured in his memory forever: the image of everyone slowly creeping out from their respective hiding places, lowering their handfuls of muck… only for Steve to launch a huge clump of it. It was just like snowball-fighting with Bucky when they were younger—only _much_ more satisfying.

“No one _expects_ Captain America to play dirty,” Clint agreed. “We’re at a disadvantage.”

Thor shrugged. “I was not caught by surprise.” Indeed, he was somehow the most free of mud out of all of them despite being the second-biggest target. “I’ve had a great deal of practice with my brother.”

“Right, ‘cause we all love to talk about that—” Tony flew down and landed, the visor of the Iron Man helmet flipping open. “JARVIS, it’s getting a little claustrophobic in here.” Immediately, the suit opened up and Tony stepped out, wearing a not-exactly- _clean_ but also untouched-by-mysterious-alien-slime T-shirt and jeans. “Incidentally, I am not covered in mud.”

Four globs of muck immediately smacked into him. Steve almost felt bad for laughing, but Tony’s stunned look as mud dripped from his hair and slid in dribbles over the glowing blue circle on his chest was absolutely priceless. 

“That’s it,” Tony said as soon as he remastered the ability of speech (that never took long with Tony Stark). “You’re all evicted. I’m renaming the tower and—oh, hey, we got Banner back!”

The muck all over him forgotten, Tony hurried over to where a nearly-naked and covered-head-to-toe-in-mud Bruce Banner lay on the pavement, slowly trying to sit up and blinking in confusion at the scene around him.

Steve joined them, starting to kneel down but then remembering the good two or three inches of goopy ooze that had formed a film over the street and sidewalk. “Good to have you back, Doctor.”

Bruce blinked again, reaching up a hand to wipe some of the muck off of his cheek, from which green was steadily receding. Unfortunately for him, the Hulk had not been at all mindful of keeping relatively clean; he’d in fact been practically rolling in the stuff. “What… why are we all… I didn’t…”

“Don’t worry, you didn’t hurt anyone, the Hulk was amazing and saved the day as usual,” Tony reassured him. He was very carefully crouching at Bruce’s side in a way that allowed him to be close but also kept his knees out of the mud. It was a position that Steve couldn’t imagine Tony holding for very long, but he was doing an impressive job so far. “To give you the short version, there’s an alien with some _really remarkable_ cellular compound symmetrics—”

“Shorter version, Tony,” Steve interrupted. The thwap-thwap-thwap of an incoming helicopter had caught his attention, and sure enough, there it was: a black speck growing larger against the grayish sky. 

“It’s S.H.I.E.L.D.” Natasha squinted upwards. “You know whenever there’s any alien-related activity they like to get involved—”

“—debrief us for five hours—” Clint added.

“—present us with some new protocol Coulson probably came up with on the flight over—”

“—and then blame the whole thing on this one over here.” Clint jerked a thumb at Thor, who blinked. 

“Highly unfair. You mortals cause enough problems on your own.”

“I wouldn’t tell that to S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Steve said just as the black helicopter lowered down, hovering a few feet above the pavement. 

A door hatch opened on the side and Nick Fury leaned out. _That’s never a good sign for what was supposed to be a relatively routine mission._ He shouted something, but the chopping of the helicopter blades drowned out his voice.

“Hello!” Thor waved. 

Fury regarded the six Avengers for a moment—Steve was suddenly extremely conscious of the alien muck splattered over his entire body, but stood up straight anyway—and waved them all to climb aboard.

“No Quinjet this time? Fury, are you downgrading us?” Clint cupped his hands around his mouth to call up.

It was truly amazing the range of disgruntled looks that the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. could give even with only one eye. “Those tend to draw more attention than we’d like, Agent Barton!”

“And mud aliens and Avengers don’t?”

“Just get in the chopper!” 

Natasha was first, ignoring the offered rope ladder and hoisting herself up with the bar. Fury’s reaction was surprising; he backed away from the door hatch, drawing himself a good distance away from Natasha and the few drops of mud trailing away behind her. The director of S.H.I.E.L.D. had never struck him as a germaphobe, but Steve supposed anything was possible.

Then Clint climbed up, and Fury did the same; moving as far out of the way as he could and staying there. That combined with the fact that Fury almost never showed up in person to collect them after missions was… suspicious.

He was distracted from that line of thought, however, by Tony calling out, “Hey, Cap, you wanna give me a hand over here?”

Steve spun to find Tony trying to help Bruce off the ground—a job made quite a bit harder, he imagined, by the fact that Bruce was resisting him at every turn.

“Tony, stop it, I can get up by myself.”

“Five seconds ago you were telling me you were going to throw up.”

“That was because I’m pretty sure the Other Guy was trying to eat the alien slime, Tony—” Bruce broke off as he noticed Steve approaching. “Hey, Steve.” 

“Doctor Banner.” Steve nodded his head toward the helicopter. “You going to join us?”

“Actually, this pile of mud seems like a pretty good spot…”

“Alright, alright.” Steve offered his arm as support, but it seemed that despite the usual post-Hulk exhaustion Bruce must have been feeling, he wasn’t quite at that level where he would accept help from Captain America, and reluctantly settled against Tony, who raised his eyebrows at Steve over Bruce’s head.

Steve shrugged and trailed after the two scientists as they made their way to the helicopter; it was a just-in-case thing, even though they didn’t seem to need his help at all. In a last-ditch effort, Steve gestured toward the empty Iron Man suit, which was standing like a sentinel at the edge of the slime puddle.

“How’re you getting that out of here. Tony?”

Tony, who was climbing into the helicopter slightly behind Bruce, looked back from where he hung on the rope ladder. A moment of confusion followed by understanding passed over his face. “Don’t worry, Cap, I can clean up after myself.”

He thrust out his hand and the armor came almost to life, disassembling itself and flying through the air toward him. Steve ducked as part of the chestplate nearly hit him in the head, unable to take his eyes away as the entire suit reassembled itself into the shape of a suitcase, which Tony grabbed and slid into the helicopter ahead of him.

_That’s new._ Or at least it was to him. Tony had probably been working on a dozen other models during one of his retreats to the workshop that could last anywhere from six hours to a long weekend. Steve wouldn’t be surprised if the man had an Iron Man suit that could fly to the moon by this point.

As soon as Tony and the world’s most powerful suitcase were completely inside, Steve vaulted himself upward and landed smoothly inside the doorway without needing to grab onto the bar or the ladder. 

“Showoff,” he heard Tony mutter, but his response died in his throat as he took in the scene before him.

The entire inside of the helicopter was covered in plastic tarp, draped over the floor and all the seats—and forming a barricade between the passenger area and the cockpit where Fury and the other S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were huddled, only accessible by unzipping a long black zipper that ran down its length. 

Steve’s damp boots made little cracking noises as he walked across the tarp-covered floor to where four Avengers had settled in: Bruce, who was either asleep or just completely zoned out to the world; Tony, who clearly wasn’t about to let aforementioned fact stop him from talking animatedly about something Steve knew he’d have no prayer of understanding; and Nat and Clint, who were sprawled out in the very back comparing their sides of the fight they’d just had.

“Listen, I was just trying to get my arrow back, I had no way of knowing that thing could climb walls,” Clint was saying as Steve sat down gingerly in the nearest empty seat, plastic crinkling underneath him. “Or whatever the hell it was doing. S.H.I.E.L.D.’ll probably come up with some horrifically appropriate name for it, like ‘The Ooze’ or whatever.”

“Hopefully it gets sent back into outer space before they get around to that,” Natasha said. She craned her neck to peer toward the still-open door, where Fury was leaning out and having a shouted conversation with Thor, who was still on the ground surrounded by muck.

Steve shifted on the plastic-covered seats. “Speaking of which… are neither of you bothered by any of this?” He patted the cover, which was getting steadily more mud-spotted as the Avengers dripped all over it. “Is it just that Fury doesn’t want us ruining his ride?”

Nat shrugged and cracked a smile. “Could be. I wouldn’t rule anything out when it comes to him.” All three of them watched the director try to yell at Thor over the whirring helicopter blades for another moment before she continued. “We have had this protocol for other missions before, though. You remember Quito?” That question was directed at Clint, who scrubbed a slimy hand across his forehead.

“I was doing a great job of blocking out the memory until you brought it up.”

“Come on, I wasn’t the only one who wished they’d had food poisoning after the balcony collapsed—”

“It’s not just that it collapsed, it’s _where_ it collapsed that was the problem—”

“I did tell you not to park so close—”

“From what I remember, you were a little busy with that Colombian representative—” Clint broke himself off as his forehead screwed up, letting a hand fall forward to grip the edge of his seat. “Whoa.”

“You alright, Barton?” Steve asked. If anything else about this situation was feeling off… 

Clint didn’t seem too concerned, however. “Yeah, just a little dizzy.”

“I’m gonna have to talk to Laura about all these late nights right before a mission, you know,” Natasha teased. She coughed discreetly into her elbow. 

Before Clint could respond, Fury gestured a command toward the agent in the pilot seat, who flicked one of the switches on the dashboard. Outside, the spinning helicopter blades gradually slowed until the noise wasn’t nearly as deafening (super soldier senses weren’t always a benefit), lowering the vehicle slightly toward the ground.

Thor gave an appreciative nod and called out, now that there was actually a chance the people on the helicopter would understand him, “What does S.H.I.E.L.D. plan to do with the creature?” He gestured to the lumpy blob that was still encased in his magical lightning web like he was asking what S.H.I.E.L.D. was planning to order for dinner.

Fury signaled two of the agents huddled around the pilot seat. “Agents Shaw and Reardon, get that alien thing into containment. As soon as it's out of here, the better.”

“You can’t talk about Thor that way,” Clint muttered under his breath. Steve bit his lip to keep from smiling.

The desire entirely left his mind, however, when he noticed the agents pulling on what looked like hazmat suits and shielded helmets before dropping down onto the street. Their boots hit the mud with a squelch, and after a few seconds of conversation with Thor—involving a lot of pointing at the hammer and the lightning crackling out of it—they held open a large mechanical box, the sort Steve imagined could hold two or three angry raccoons, and allowed Thor to drop the alien creature inside.

As soon as the lid was shut and the box was locked up tight, Thor and the agents entered the helicopter; the agents using the ladder and Thor leaping up just as Steve had done. He sat down in the space between Natasha and Tony, setting his hammer beside him. The box, Steve observed, was very carefully placed on the floor before the plastic dividing sheet between the passenger seats and the cockpit was zipped up entirely, leaving Fury and the other agents behind the shiny, rippling, wall. 

Fury must have noticed Steve staring at the agents—who were now cautiously removing the hazmat suits and setting them into a drawer that made a whooshing sound when they pressed a button on it, which… not reassuring—because he said, “Don’t worry, Captain, we’ll have a fully equipped team in here shortly to, ah, finish cleaning up the mess. My job is just to get the Avengers out of here as soon as possible.”

The moment the words left his mouth, the agent piloting the helicopter began lifting it off the ground as though on cue. The blades quickened into a steady chopping sound as they rose higher and higher. As they drew into the air, he couldn’t tell whether or not he was imagining the gooey _slo-o-or-r-r-p_ of the remaining alien muck on the ground sucking at the bottom of the helicopter, but he had a feeling he already knew the answer.

“I’m sure I understand,” Steve replied from the other side of the plastic barrier. The windows were staining gray and white as the tops of buildings were left below them. “Mind giving us an explanation, though?”

“And—” Bruce interrupted suddenly, which wasn’t really a Bruce Banner-typical thing to do, but as he sat up, it was obvious that the mucky alien slime that had been blanketing him was now drying and crumbling off, leading to… well, leading to a smirk from Tony Stark, which really told you all you needed to know about a situation. “And, um, if I could get some clothes, that would be…” He drifted off but then added in a more defensive tone of voice, “Hey, it’s November in New York,”

Steve scanned the interior of the helicopter, but it was obvious at first glance that there was nothing in here that wasn’t attached or molded or secured to something else, and definitely nothing in the way of clothing. He himself wasn’t wearing any sort of layers… it was pretty hard to hide anything under the Captain America suit, and zipping a jacket over it would make him look like a kid on Halloween whose mother didn’t want them to get cold. 

Fortunately, it looked like Tony had it handled. He smirked but adjusted himself into an awkward sort of lean that managed to cover Bruce without falling into his lap, _and_ he somehow managed to make this look completely casual. Although by this point, Steve was pretty sure Tony could find a way to walk around in the Black Widow suit and make it look casual. 

“We’ll send an agent to Avengers Tower to retrieve some of your personal belongings,” Fury said in a voice that was probably meant to be reassuring, but hindered by the fact that this was _Nick Fury_ talking, that he was talking from behind a protective plastic sheet and… _hold on,_ what _did he just say?_

All of the Avengers turned toward Fury with varying degrees of surprise, confusion, and suspicion on their faces, but predictably, Tony was the first one to speak.

“All right, I’m gonna speak for the team again, I hope that’s not overstepping any boundaries we might have in our professional relationships—” Tony sat up straight and began counting on his fingers. “First off, is this not exactly why we have the Quinjet; so those of our more clothing-challenged members have stuff to change into after fights? Second off, whatever poor schmuck you’re planning on sending to the Tower is going to have a surprise if they think JARVIS’ll let any random agent inside, and third off, everything I just said is essentially irrelevant right now since, ah, last time I checked, we are completely capable of getting our own damn personal belongings as soon as we’re home.”

“Stark makes many good points,” Thor agreed. Steve nodded and rested his arms on the edge of his shield, leaning forward to get a better view of the current stare-off happening between Tony and Fury. “There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to return to the tower ourselves. After we dispose of the creature, of course.” 

“Fury, it would be your advantage to tell us what’s going on,” Natasha said. “‘Cause we already know— _something’s_ going on.” 

There was no sound except the helicopter blades spinning and spinning outside as Fury became the target of six of probably the most intense stares on the planet. At least the ones with both eyes, anyway. 

The director was looking like he’d swallowed a lemon, but he finally answered. “I didn’t want to have to tell any of you this until we were secure at the base, but apparently standard protocol dissolves once you bring a team of superheroes with overdeveloped trust issues into the mix.”

“Sounds about right,” Natasha replied.

Fury sighed and pulled a S.H.I.E.L.D. tablet from a pocket in his coat. After a few taps on the screen, he spun it around to show the group a series of official-looking images and charts. 

Steve was too far away to read the words, but Fury narrated as he swiped through a few slides. “About twenty-eight minutes after you all were called to assemble, we began getting reports from civilians about certain… side effects from coming into contact with that alien slime.” He swiped to a photo of the slime, which seemed a little unnecessary, since all of the Avengers were dripping in it. 

“What kind of side effects?” Steve asked. In the seat across from him, Tony pulled his phone out of his pocket and started tapping it, thumbs moving rapidly. 

Fury swiped to the next slide. “It seems that the alien was carrying some sort of extraterrestrial virus that is transferred through the—for lack of a better term—slime. Eight civilians are currently thought to have contracted it in the past hour and are experiencing symptoms of disorientation, fever, cough, dizziness, and difficulty breathing. It doesn’t appear to be life-threatening, but S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors are still in the very, _very_ , early stages of experimentation. When dealing with something like this where we don’t even know what it is or where it came from, we don’t want to take any chances.” After swiping past a few more slides showing medical jargon and blurred-for-privacy photos of hospital beds, he folded up the tablet and lifted his gaze. “We’ve been quarantining everyone who’s had exposure to the alien excretion, which, unfortunately… includes all of you.”

Tony set his phone down in his lap slowly and looked up, his face a mask. “He’s right.”

Steve let out a long breath and laced his fingers together around the edge of his shield. Natasha and Clint shared an inscrutable look that could have meant anything, and Thor carefully wiped a splatter of muck that had come from his hair off of the helicopter seat with a thumb.

“I guess the first thing we should ask is…” Steve did not want to be the one to break the silence, but it seemed that Fury had said his piece, and Tony was buried in his phone again and typing furiously, and everyone else… well, they were how you’d expect after the news that they all might be infected with a mysterious alien virus. There was a “Captain” in his name for a reason. “... does anybody feel any symptoms? I don’t know how long they would take to show up, and I know it might be hard to tell after the fight we’ve just had, but—”

“I’ve been feeling dizzy for the past… I would put it at twelve minutes or so,” Clint answered, staring carefully at the ceiling, offering up bare facts like the agent he was. “At first I might’ve thought it was a head injury, but…” He winced and rubbed a hand across his forehead. “... yeah, and my brain feels like it’s about to split open too.”

Natasha put a hand on his shoulder, which Clint either didn’t notice or didn’t want to acknowledge.

Fury nodded. “Thank you, Agent Barton. Could be nothing, but I didn’t get this far by ignoring medical scientists.”

“Speaking of medical scientists,” Tony spoke up abruptly, his hands never pausing from whatever he was doing on that phone—getting his own look at the S.H.I.E.L.D. reports? Compiling whatever data existed on viruses from space? Telling Pepper he wasn’t going to be home tonight?—even as his eyes lifted to meet Fury’s. “Anyone report any different effects if the goopy stuff was, uh, ingested?”

Steve looked down at his boots to avoid looking at Bruce, and he got the feeling he wasn’t the only one.

“Inconclusive,” Fury replied, stone-faced. 

Bruce shrugged, and Steve felt like he could finally look up. “It’s okay; not like I can get sick anyway.” He gestured to Thor and Steve. “And from what I know about your physiologies, I’m betting it’s the same case for both of you.”

That had been one of the somewhat unexpected results of the serum, and one that was nearly as hard to get used to as having to duck under low doorways and shut drawers with two fingers so he didn’t accidentally smash everything in the cupboard. Before the serum, he’d resigned himself to getting sick with one thing or another at least twenty times every winter, and it was startling to find out that, yes, his body was planning on working normally for longer than a week at a time. 

Even seventy years at a time, apparently… _time to get off that train of thought._

“So far, yeah,” Steve answered as Thor nodded his assent. 

“It takes a truly powerful disease to incapacitate an Asgardian,” Thor said loftily. “I cannot imagine anything here on Earth would be able to do the trick.”

“Well, you still have to be quarantined,” Fury said sharply. He leaned back and said something to the pilot, who nodded and held up a hand with five fingers splayed. “We should be at the base shortly; try not to wreck the helicopter until then.”

This would usually be when one of the team said something like “no promises,” or “there go my plans for the afternoon,” or Tony would point out that he was a billionaire and could buy fifty of these flying buckets if he wanted to, and Natasha would roll her eyes even as she was trying not to smile, and…

Now everyone was quiet. No doubt their minds were going miles a minute, beginning the wondering and the waiting and the “when is it going to be me,” but on the outside the Avengers could have been statues of themselves, propped up in helicopter seats and fixed on nothing.

Steve stared out the window at the gray clouds speeding past them and tried to ignore Clint rubbing at his forehead when he thought no one was paying attention, the sound of Natasha coughing quietly into her elbow, and Tony’s frantic eyes staring into the harsh light of his phone screen.


	2. Close Proximity

It seemed like another several lifetimes had passed by the time the helicopter finally touched the ground on a landing pad at an unmarked black building Steve only recognized as a S.H.I.E.L.D. base because it was in the middle of who-knew-where and everyone who didn’t have a gun had a hazmat suit. 

He didn’t get a chance to take in many of the details as they were rushed inside—just Fury announcing their arrival into a walkie-talkie, the whoosh of glass doors opening to let them in, the sound of so many footsteps clacking against the hard floor, an off-to-the-side hallway that had been draped in protective plastic and at least seven layers of security before they were allowed through, a series of agents who were either way too businesslike or who whispered excitedly about the Avengers the moment they thought they were out of Steve’s hearing, and someone taking his shield… and Tony’s suit… and Clint’s bow… (they stopped at Mjolnir, thank god) and saying something about decontamination before ushering ( _“herding” would be a better word,_ Steve thought to himself) the entire team into a black-tiled box with some faucets on the wall. 

Only then was Steve allowed to take a proper look around. The thing was, now there wasn’t much to look around at. The room they were in was exactly the same as his first impression of it: a black-tiled box with some faucets on the wall. 

He turned around just in time to see the agents that had escorted them backing through the door again. The _only_ door. “Hey, what the—”

“Currently, all of you are walking contaminators.” Fury’s voice came from somewhere in the crush of suited-up agents. “Once you’re done washing off the alien excretion, we can take you to the quarantine room, but as long as you’re covered in it, you’ll just infect yourselves and each other all over again, so if you wouldn’t mind…” 

Steve looked to where Fury was pointing and spotted a rack on the wall with soap, washcloths, and towels. Either S.H.I.E.L.D. had had way more time to prepare than he’d thought, or they dealt with this kind of thing often, which could easily have been the case based on how calmly Clint dug out his hearing aids and dropped them into the proffered contaminant bag held out by one of the agents before walking back over to the faucets. 

Fury cleared his throat. “Ah, Agent Romanoff?”

“Yes?” Natasha was in the process of squeezing some of the slime out of her hair.

“There’s a separate shower this way, if you’d prefer.”

Natasha straightened up, letting some of the drops of slime flick away. “I would, as a matter of fact. I prefer all of you with clothing on.”

Steve felt himself blush as Clint let out a snorting noise that turned into a quickly-stifled cough. That in itself effectively killed whatever joke Tony was about to make. 

Once Natasha was led away and the agents were out of sight (even though, if he knew S.H.I.E.L.D., they were probably still being monitored just in case one of them dropped dead on the spot or something), the remaining members of the team began to strip off their alien-mud-soaked uniforms. Clint was done the fastest, stepping underneath the spray of one of the showerheads and wiping himself off with trained efficiency. 

Steve wasn’t _looking_ or anything, not on purpose, but as he fiddled with the straps on his boots, he caught sight of a half-healed-over cut wrapping its way around Clint’s ankle. _That looks nasty; did that happen during this fight?_

His gaze jumped to another trailing from Clint’s ear to his shoulder blade, this one almost faded white. And more; smaller marks denting the archer’s back, a dark bruise on his arm, red marks lining him everywhere the straps of his quiver dug into his skin. 

Sometimes it was easy to forget that not everyone on the team was unbreakable.

And then Clint, without turning, voice distorted by the water pounding down around him and by his carefully modulated volume, said, “I don’t mind if you wanna watch, Cap, but I’ll remind you I’m a married man.”

The blush that had been fading from Natasha’s comment was now back in full force. “Oh. No—that wasn’t what I was doing. I just—” Steve sighed as Tony howled with laughter and Thor looked over curiously from where he was folding up his cape. “Just… Clint, I didn’t know you were hurt.”

That earned a genuine look of confusion, probably as Clint tried to figure out if he’d read Steve’s lips correctly. “What are you talking about? No, I’m not.”

Steve lifted his eyebrows pointedly.

“Look, half of these’re from years ago anyway. Today’s fight wasn’t even bad; last one I dislocated my wrist again and Tasha was otherwise occupied so I had to—” Clint stopped as he saw the look on Steve’s face. “As weirdly touching as this is, you don’t need to worry about me. I’ve been a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent for half my life, this isn’t new. It’s a part of the job that, honestly, I don’t even notice anymore.”

Steve nodded. “Yeah. Sorry about that, it just…” _It just reminded me how much more vulnerable everyone is, how easily they can be hurt—or sick… or maybe it’s just the serum putting things in perspective._ Either way, it was definitely better for him not to say any of that aloud.

And Clint, being Clint, simply said “It’s cool” and went back to rinsing the muck out of his hair. 

“Okay, enough of that,” Tony spoke up, interrupting Steve’s increasingly detailed train of thought that had been building on itself with memories of a speeding train and a crowded street. “Even though I’m pretty sure that was the most words Barton’s ever said in a row, maybe we should actually get to the whole showering thing before the Director of Doom gets back in here, ‘cause there are some places Fury’s eye just should not be.”

“Director of Doom? That’s what you came up with?” 

Steve was glad to hear that Bruce was awake, he had been legitimately concerned that the scientist had fallen asleep standing up in the farmost shower.

Tony waved his hand around. “You don’t appreciate my brilliant alliteration? I’ll put that one back on the drawing board. _But_ my point still stands.” 

“You should talk.” Steve gestured to Tony, who was still fully dressed and nowhere near the showers.

Tony shrugged. “Fine.” Two seconds later his jeans were on the floor and Steve was rubbing the bridge of his nose and trying to avoid the memories of Howard that were springing to mind. 

Tony then yanked off his T-shirt and tossed it on top of the pants, now dressed in nothing but a white tank top through which the blue glow of the arc reactor could be clearly seen. He paused, staring down at the light. Steve could see a shudder go through his hands.

Without saying a word, Steve turned away and began pulling the top of his sweaty, sticking-to-him suit off, dropping it on the floor in a pile of red, white, and blue fabric. He understood where Tony was coming from; for him, walking around shirtless had only gotten more uncomfortable after the super soldier serum had taken effect. And it wasn’t even about the nakedness itself—he’d been in the Army after all—it was more about the sheer amount of this new superhero body that was being displayed. He wasn’t entirely sure why—god knew his body before the serum hadn’t been anything he’d want to show off—but it still didn’t quite feel like it was his. Like it wasn’t just an extension of the Captain America suit, a body to match the persona that he might have been borrowing for now, but he’d still have to put back when he was done. 

He could hear Tony still talking as he peeled the undershirt away from the reactor, nonsensical things that probably weren’t even processing in his brain before they came out of his mouth. “You think we’d all be used to this by now, right? Nothing we haven’t seen before, you know, and nothing wrong with that and all, and it’s really just a hazard of the trade at this point, isn’t it? Especially when Big Green’s concerned—speaking of hazards. Maybe we should do this more often, show some solidarity, what do you think, Bruce?” He laughed as though that were the world’s best-crafted joke.

“That’s great, Tony.” Bruce shut one of his eyes as water dripped into it. “I’m already surprised I’ve never been fined for public indecency yet.” 

“All the more reason—hey, I didn’t know Captain America went commando under the suit!”

Steve had been attempting to roll up his pants and toss them away with the rest of his uniform without attention being drawn, but he was in a room with a Tony Stark looking for distraction. And unfortunately, a Tony Stark looking for distraction was not a good thing to have in the room with you when you didn’t want to be scrutinized head to foot. 

“Is it too much to ask that we just take our showers like normal human beings?” Bruce asked, half glancing behind him before quickly turning back.

“Very few of us are,” Thor pointed out. “Although I am not sure what the issue is; are we not unwinding as teammates do after a battle?”

“I dunno what you do with your “teammates” on Asgard, pal, but here checking out each other’s asses isn’t exactly par for the course.” Clint’s voice lilted with amusement even as he pretended he wasn’t paying attention to the others. And usually he might’ve gotten away with it, except that now he gave himself away with his studied glances at everyone’s moving lips.

Tony spread his arms. “Can you really blame us? How often do you get the chance with a bunch of literal superhumans? … and us two schmucks, but I’d say we’re still doing all right for ourselves.”

“Keep telling yourself that, Stark.” Clint paused before grinning at Steve. “That’s one fact they sure don’t mention in the movies, though.”

Steve sighed before stepping into the spray from another showerhead. The water was medium temperature and felt good sliding over his sweaty, beaten-up, alien-slimy, skin. He tilted his head back and let it wash the gunk off his face. “Listen.” He barely got the word out before both Tony and Clint were stifling laughter. “ _Listen_ . There’s not exactly a whole lot of room in there for—the uniform is goddamn _spandex_ , in case you haven’t noticed.”

Tony winked. “Oh, trust me, I’ve noticed.” His long-stifled laughter finally spilled out, only for it to turn into a choked cough, which turned into more and more until it sounded like he could hardly breathe. Steve was torn between respecting Tony’s obvious aversion to being seen without something covering the arc reactor and wanting to make sure he wasn’t… well…

While he was still frozen—the shower water pouring down his face definitely seemed colder than before, it wasn’t just him, right?—Thor took matters into his own hands.

There was the sound of heavy wet footprints walking over to Tony before Thor’s voice asked, “Stark, can you breathe?”

It took a few seconds before Tony could answer, and when he did it was breathless. “Oh, yeah. Just peachy. Just—” He coughed again, but after that he was able to clear his throat, taking in a slow inhale. 

Steve finally turned around to see Tony with one hand braced against the wall, the other over his chest, hints of blue peeking in between his fingers. Thor stood over him, a worried expression on his face and a hand resting on Tony’s back. Steve wondered how long it would be before Tony noticed, but almost as soon as he formed the thought, Tony straightened up and shrugged off Thor’s hand.

“Appreciate the concern, Point Break, but it seems I’ll live.” If that was meant to sound reassuring, Tony had failed miserably, as everyone in the room rounded sharply toward him. Fury’s assurance that the alien virus “wasn’t life-threatening” was a little hard to keep in mind now that the sound of Tony’s breathing—and Clint’s too, but he was better at hiding it—was becoming harder to ignore with his super soldier hearing. 

Especially since Fury had admitted himself that they were extremely early in the testing process… which Steve took as S.H.I.E.L.D.-speak for “no one knows, not yet.”

“Ste-eve. Cap. _Capitàn._ Hello-o.”

Steve blinked and focused on Tony again, who was facing the opposite wall and fiddling with the warm-water cold-water tap. “What?”

“Just making sure your brain hadn’t turned into an icicle again. That would definitely get us a write-up in the mission reports.”

Steve raised his eyebrows. “Since when do you even fill out a mission report?”

“All the—”

“Since when do you fill out a mission report without JARVIS?”

Tony arranged his face into the haughtiest expression he could make. “I am _using_ all the means at my disposal to make sure S.H.I.E.L.D. gets all the facts. I never would’ve thought Captain America would want to impede freedom of information.”

“What Captain America wants is a burger and a nap,” Steve said. “And I don’t particularly care the order.”

“A man after my own heart.” There was a tap of a finger on metal before Tony finished attaching the waterproof cover over the arc reactor and allowed the water to spill over him, washing off the alien muck.

It was at that moment when Thor finally wrestled off the last piece of that Asgardian armor—it had been driving Tony crazy for months, since it didn’t seem to be made of any metal that obeyed the laws of science, even if apparently twenty-five new elements had been added to the periodic table in the past seventy years and you’d think one of them would be helpful, but Tony had just picked up the coffee pot and took a drink directly from it when Steve had made that suggestion—revealing chest and stomach muscles that Steve didn’t know existed. And who knew, maybe they were some weird Asgardian thing, considering that even the super serum hadn’t made him look like _that_. 

Thor strode over to one of the empty shower spots, prompting Bruce to lean forward and press his forehead against the tile wall, water running down the back of his neck.

The team collectively decided to stop talking for the rest of the time that it took them to rinse off.

* * *

Whether it was the steam from the shower or just the calm before the storm, most of the team’s symptoms, other than slightly dry throats and more-than-just-the-usual-post-battle exhaustion, had been relatively nonexistent, but as they stepped out into the painfully-brightly-lit, air-conditioned-despite-it-being-November hallway, all the reminders of why they were here and not waiting for the pizza guy while sprawled on one of Tony’s couches at the Tower popped right back out,

It started with Clint, who swayed on his way out the door, nearly dropping the towel he had twisted around his waist. 

_It’s not even a good towel,_ Steve thought disjointedly as he, Tony, Bruce, and Thor made forward movements as one to catch their resident archer before he face-planted on the oddly reflective S.H.I.E.L.D. base floor. _Absolutely no fluff to it whatsoever, It’s like it was made for people who hate towels. Or people who want other people to hate towels. It’s a very stingily made towel, in my opinion, and I lived through the Great Depression._

It took another moment before his brain was able to reconnect and put it together that he was only thinking about the towel because the alternative was thinking about Clint, and he didn’t want to think about Clint right now because Clint wasn’t looking too hot and he didn’t know what to do—

And then Clint really did fall, and the arms that were closest happened to be Steve’s own, and that was apparently all he needed to really pull himself together, because he straightened up and shifted the archer into a more stable position. 

“Clint? You with us?” Yeah, there was his “Captain” voice making another appearance. Even if he wasn’t sure that Clint even knew what he was saying.

Clint blinked, eyes darting around like they were trying to figure out where he was, and then widening in shock as he realized that his head was leaning against Steve’s shoulder and nearly all of his weight was not being supported by himself. “What the fuck—”

“Take that as a yes?” Tony suggested. 

Clint frowned and moved his lips in an attempt to figure out what Tony had said before groaning and giving up. “Everything is spinning right now.” Clint closed his eyes hard before opening them again. His voice was fading in and out. “Yeah, that did nothing. Don’t worry, I’ve had like twenty concussions by now, you can let go—”

“You should definitely sit down,” Bruce suggested. Like the others, he was hovering around Steve and Clint like one of Tony’s bots whenever there was a hint that something might catch on fire. “Maybe put your head between your knees. I don’t know what S.H.I.E.L.D.’s looked into as far as the treatment for the virus, but you can’t go wrong if you go by the basics.” 

Clint glared even as he struggled to escape Steve’s grip. “I think I can handle—” Breaking free, his face instantly drained of all color and he barely caught himself on the wall.

Bruce nodded sympathetically. “Yeah.”

“Perhaps our archer would be more inclined to listen to us with these.” Thor stepped up and held out his hand, on which rested a set of new S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue hearing aids. Clint took them with a grateful nod and slipped them in his ears, twisting them around until they fit. 

“Where’d you find those?” Steve asked.

Thor pointed behind him.”Did no one else notice…?”

Everyone followed his gaze to a couple piles of fresh clothing stacked neatly on the floor, everything from shirts and pants to plain gray sneakers, and enough for five people. There was also a folded pair of glasses sitting on top of one of the piles, which Bruce picked up.

“Ah. Sight.”

“Good to know S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t want us wearing their towels indefinitely,” Tony said, grabbing one of the shirts and shaking it out until it unfolded, revealing a white S.H.I.E.L.D. logo against stiff black fabric. “Actually, I might need to revise that statement.”

“Fury said we’ll be getting our own clothes from the Tower; this is just temporary.” Steve pulled on one of the pairs of pants—he was assuming this pile was his, as everything seemed to fit.

“You mean he said one of his _agents_ will be getting our shit from the Tower,” Tony corrected. “Nobody has any clue how long we’re going to be here.”

“What are you implying?” Steve really did not want to argue with Tony right now—he didn’t want to argue with Tony ever, but sometimes Tony opened his mouth just for the sake of it and sometimes Steve was too quick to pick a fight and those were not a good combination. He wished he could say he regretted it, but… well, not all the time. 

Tony didn’t answer for a moment, staring at the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on his socks with distaste before pulling them on. “Avengers Tower is one of the most secure places on the planet. Only a very, very, privileged select few are allowed inside on a daily basis. And it doesn’t hurt that it just happens to be equipped with the best security A.I. in the business that can provide all the data you could want on communicable disease.”

Oh boy. “Tony, we can’t go anywhere; I know you don’t like it, but we have to be responsible—”

“How would that not be responsible?” Tony sat up straighter, socks forgotten. “We’ve got at least two of the most brilliant people in the world plus whatever alien knowledge Thor’s got stored in that blond head of his, and the rest of you aren’t slouches and come on we’re the _Avengers_ . We’ve got a responsibility to _fix_ this, and we can’t do that from here.”

“But you can,” Bruce pointed out, his voice significantly softer. “Not that I’m trying to feed your ego or anything, but come on. You’ve done more with less.” He pointed to the arc reactor. “Plus this is S.H.I.E.L.D. we’re talking about; you really think they’re gonna have us at their base like they’ve always wanted and not try to use us for solutions?”

Tony didn’t have a retort ready for that one, which Steve could only hope meant he was slowly being convinced. He wanted to add that _also just in case you’ve forgotten,_ you’re _sick too; you and Natasha and Clint all need to be under better care than just Bruce and JARVIS, especially since we have no idea what this alien disease can even do and_ maybe _not going back to the most populated city in the country would be a better idea because Avengers Tower isn’t a bubble and I know how wrecked you would be if you somehow gave it to Pepper…_

And he knew Tony had thought of all that, could see it in the slump of his shoulders and the almost helpless look in his eyes, but he also knew that the disease was likely preying on his already way-too-self-sacrificial tendencies and conviction that it was his responsibility to protect everyone else… making this forced quarantine by S.H.I.E.L.D. a whole lot harder. And Steve couldn’t even bring up Tony’s personal health as an argument—he was as stubborn about that as he was about team dinners after a call to assemble. 

So he appealed to that stubborn scientist side. “Bruce is right. Whatever you want to do, need to do, to help, there’s no way Fury won’t give you the tools. I think everyone at S.H.I.E.L.D. remembers what happened the last time they didn’t listen to Tony Stark. They’ve got people working on this, Tony, and there’s no reason why you can’t be one of them, but it’s not all on your shoulders.”

Tony huffed, a little bit of a cough in the sound. “Hypocrite.”

Steve laughed, more out of relief than anything else, and went back to getting dressed with the rest of the team in silence. It really was astounding how many places S.H.I.E.L.D. thought it was a good idea to print their logo on considering the whole secret organization thing, but at least the shoes and pants were all clear.

Once they were done, the sliding door on the opposite side of the hallway clicked open, and in strode Fury, flanked by a couple more agents. These ones were new, Steve was pretty sure; apparently the job of disinfecting the Avengers’ assorted belongings took a lot of hands on deck. 

But he didn’t have much time to dwell on that, because just then he spotted Natasha standing slightly apart from the other agents; dressed in the same S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue outfit and sporting a black-and-blue bruise on the side of her forehead.

“Hey,” was all she said. She was looking paler than normal and exhausted. _Not unlike Clint and Tony._

“Hey,” Steve echoed. “Where’d you get that?”

Natasha felt her forehead like she’d forgotten the bruise was there. “It’s not a big deal.” At the looks she was getting from the other five, she sighed. “I could blame the soapy shower floor, but that would mess up my secret-agent reputation just as badly, so… I kinda tripped. It’ll heal. That’s it.”

“Clint’s been feeling dizzy too,” Bruce said, earning himself a muttered “thanks a lot” from the archer in question. “It would probably be a good idea to record this—how long after exposure they started showing symptoms, and which ones appeared first, and does it vary from person to person—”

“We have the best scientists in the country working on those very things as we speak, Doctor Banner,” Fury interrupted. “As much as it might surprise you, we do know what we’re doing. Which is why the next stop for all of you will be a quarantine room.”

Tony was looking like he wanted to start arguing again, so Steve discreetly elbowed him in the side. “Sounds perfect.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, Captain.” Yeah, there was no way Fury hadn’t been monitoring their argument earlier. “Now if you’d all follow me. Preferably without comment.”

* * *

S.H.I.E.L.D.’s quarantine room looked exactly as you would expect S.H.I.E.L.D.’s quarantine room to look, which is to say it was a small white box with one side entirely made of reinforced glass that looked into the hallway and absolutely nothing to suggest that a human had ever set foot in it before (and Steve felt that he could safely make that comparison, as there were several rooms in Avengers Tower that he was positive had only been populated by Tony and his bots since construction). Nevertheless, Fury ushered them inside as though it were a five-star bed-and-breakfast. 

“Not to appear like I’m questioning S.H.I.E.L.D.’s expertise or anything,” Tony started off as the door slid shut behind them, leaving Fury and the agents on the other side of the glass. “But you do realize there are six Avengers, right?” He gestured around the room, which seemed even smaller now that all of them were closed in it. 

“There weren’t always supposed to be,” Fury reminded him. Bruce looked at the floor while Thor wandered over to one of the shelves and flicked on a lamp. A little circle of golden light haloed part of the wall as well as Thor’s nonchalant expression. “And there’s a bathroom through that door.” 

“Luxurious.”

Natasha’s mouth quirked. “Please don’t play the billionaire right now, Stark; we’ve got bigger problems.”

“I was just trying to be practical.” Tony spread his hands. “I’m just surprised Nick over here thinks we can all survive the close—close proximity, I mean—” He broke off and started to cough again, stumbling backwards until his back hit the wall and he could hold himself up, refusing to let either Steve or Thor help him.

Fury watched, some inscrutable emotion visible on his face. Steve couldn’t figure out what it reminded him of—and then it clicked. It was the same emotion Pepper had had the first time he met her, after the Battle of New York when she and Tony had been a whirlwind of talking over each other about who even knew what—and then Tony had explained that he’d tried to call her while pushing the nuke through the wormhole, and that _exact look_ … the one where Pepper realized that the phone had been ringing next to her and she hadn’t heard it… that she would only have seen the missed call later if things had gone very, very wrong… that things had been so _close_ to going so wrong. 

And seeing it on Fury’s face now as Tony gasped for air, hand clutching at the spot on his shirt where the arc reactor lay beneath… Steve didn’t like that at all. 

“Isn’t there anything we can do about this?” he asked. Behind him, Clint slowly lowered himself to the floor, Natasha joining him hardly a second later. Bruce was crouched beside Tony, talking too quickly and too quietly for Steve to hear, but Tony seemed to be listening, his breathing evening out. “You can’t tell me to just wait for it to stop; I know medicine’s evolved since cold water and heroin. There’s gotta be—”

“Medicine has evolved, I’ll give you that,” Fury interrupted. Steve fell silent and stared at him through the glass. “But this isn’t just some everyday, run-of-the-mill virus. Hell, it came from a space alien. It might take modern medicine a little while to catch up.” He met Steve’s gaze. “I’m asking the Earth’s mightiest heroes to just sit tight until we do.”

“Some of us might have a problem with that.”

Fury raised his eyebrows. “I should think that you of all—”

“I wasn’t talking about me.” Steve glanced over his shoulder to where Tony seemed to have calmed down, his eyes closed and his head tilted back against the wall. If he was aware of Bruce still beside him, watching him as though he might dissolve otherwise, he didn’t show it. 

“Hmm.” 

Fury looked pensive. Steve tried to keep from bouncing impatiently—god, it was like he was a little kid again and waiting for a teacher to agree to _please_ put him and Bucky together because Barnes wasn’t _that_ much higher in the alphabet than Rogers—and instead shoved his hands in his pockets. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Nick Fury—how could he not, after the shock of “you’ve-been-asleep-for-almost-seventy-years” had worn off, after the director had shown in New York just how dedicated he was to the idea of the Avengers—it was that Nick Fury was the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. and not the director of a counseling service for superheroes in crisis. 

Finally, Fury leveled him with a gaze. “If I’m being completely straight with you, I had already intended for Doctor Banner and most likely Thor to assist our scientists with the research.”

 _That’s S.H.I.E.L.D. for ya_ , Steve thought, but he kept listening. 

“If I were in a different line of work, I would recommend bed rest and fluids and all that. However, I have seen too many stubborn-ass self-sacrificial agents in my time, and I know full well that Stark here could be their poster boy.” He paused. “I’ll be having agents Fitzsimmons send some of the data along your way tomorrow morning, and as I am not in quarantine myself, I will have no control over who sees it.”

Steve blew out a breath. “It’ll mean a lot to him.” And it wasn’t just that, either; if all he wanted was to distract Tony, he’d get Bruce to debate him on nyquist stability or something, but this was different, this was seeing his teammates start to suffer and wanting to do whatever he could to fix it. But Steve wasn’t a genius and he wasn’t a doctor and he couldn’t shield his friends from this disease—so the only thing he could do was scrounge up help in the only place he could find it. And if there was even the slightest chance that Bruce or Tony or Thor might be able to come up with something, anything… he was gonna make sure they had that chance. 

“Oh, I know. Trust me when I say that man’s got a relentless streak a mile long.” Fury paused again. “I wouldn’t forget about those fluids, though.”

Steve nodded and Fury and the other agents walked away, leaving the Avengers now well and truly alone for however long it would take. He stared at the empty glass wall for a moment, his reflection still wet from the shower. 

Then he heard a strangled “oh _fuck_ —” and whirled around just in time to see Tony shove Bruce away and stumble to his feet, dashing through the single door that Fury had clarified was the bathroom. A few moments later came the unmistakable sound of someone throwing up. 

Steve walked over, ending up next to Thor. It was going to be a _long_ however-long-it-would-take.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	3. If You Had to Guess

The room was still dark when Steve woke up the next morning—so dark that he wasn’t even sure it  _ was  _ morning. When he twisted around in the sheets, however, and blinked half-awake eyes at the red lights of the digital clock, it confirmed that it was indeed 4:23 A.M. 

He tried to stretch his arms over his head, but they bumped against something hard above him.  _ Oh, right. The ceiling.  _

Their quarantine room had thoughtfully been outfitted with three sets of bunks, each carved out of the wall like pods in a spaceship from one of those movies Clint and Nat had made him watch. The idea was in all likelihood to conserve space, but Steve hadn’t really ever wanted to know what it would be like to be in the top bunk with a thunder god snoring beneath you. 

Yeah, he was with Thor. There hadn’t been any discussion about it, really; Clint and Natasha had claimed the one closest to the door, both of them exhausted and sick but not letting that stop them from the most intense glare-off over who got the top bunk (Natasha won), Bruce and Tony taking the one against the opposite wall, setting a trash can next to Tony’s bottom bunk just in case, and that only left Steve and Thor to shrug at each other before Thor tossed Mjolnir on the bedside table. It was different from at the Tower, when sometimes even the most ridiculous sci-fi movie Tony could come up with wouldn’t be enough to keep them all awake and they’d drift off in various positions around the living room, but everyone was just tired enough not to make any comment. 

Today—er, yesterday—the whole team, even the ones that hadn’t been currently fighting off the early stages of an alien disease, were barely on their feet after that day’s battle, so falling asleep had been easy enough, and aside from a few surreal dreams that now felt like fuzzy blurs, so had staying that way.

Steve just wasn’t sure what could possibly have woken him up. He sat in silence for a while, listening to the slow, repetitive sound of the others’ breath. 

And then—there it was. A quiet, stifled, sound, almost a whimper, followed by the rustling of sheets. The sound made Steve’s heart jump into his throat.

Carefully, he scanned the room, gratefully to the slightly more enhanced night vision the serum had given him. He didn’t know whether it was anything special or whether his eyesight before the serum had just been shit, but it came in useful now as he spotted trembling underneath the covers of one of the beds.

As silently as he could, he swung himself off of the top bunk and over to the other bed, where its occupant had managed to jam themselves as tightly as possible into the crack between the mattress and the wall. 

Now that he was closer, the sounds were obvious and painful, even muffled by the pillow.

“Hey,” he whispered.

In a flash, a hand lunged out from under the sheets and grabbed his wrist hard enough to leave a bruise. Steve swallowed his cry of surprise, focusing instead on being as calm and nonthreatening as possible. 

“Hey,” he said again. “Natasha. You’re okay. It’s me.”

The figure in the bed rolled over with a low groan, the sheet slipping away to reveal Natasha’s pale and sweat-soaked face. Her eyes were wide, but lacking their usual calculating depth, adding weight to Steve’s theory that she wasn’t exactly batting a thousand at the moment. 

She frowned. “Steve?”

“Yep.” Steve wanted to ask her to let go of his wrist, as it was kinda starting to hurt, but refrained. “You didn’t sound so good, so I just wanted to check you were doing alright.”  _ And something tells me that check did not succeed. _

“Mmmm.” Natasha’s eyes drifted shut, then flew open again. “I was having this strange dream—”

“Uh-huh?”

“Can’t remember… I don’t wanna go back to sleep, though.” Her grip only tightened, but Steve kept his expression as blank as he could.

He racked his brain for something she would listen to. “Sorry, Nat. As long as we’re in quarantine, Fury’s orders are for you three to rest up—”

“But—” Natasha broke off with a harsh cough that had her scrambling to sit up. Hers wasn’t as bad as Tony’s—the Black Widow didn’t have an arc reactor swallowing seventy percent of her lung capacity, after all—but it still sounded incredibly painful. Steve rested his hand on her back, feeling the heat radiating off of her. Any hope that the disease would be fleeting was dwindling by the second.

“Hey, Rogers?” Natasha asked weakly as soon as she could take a deep breath again. “I really, really don’t like that alien.”

Steve laughed, more out of surprise than anything else. “Yeah, me neither.”

“When Thor takes it back to Asgard, he should put it in some… some space blender or something,” she added, her words blurring into each other. Steve wondered if there was a way he could take her temperature without her snapping into more assassin moves or whether he should just leave that for Bruce in the morning. 

“Might be a better smoothie than that green stuff Tony makes,” he said. 

“I like them,” Natasha protested. “Very kiwi-y. Do you think—” She tried to wriggle her feet out from where they were tangled in the sheets at the end of the bed, but ended up banging her heel against the footboard. “Ow.”

A sleepy voice came from below them. “Hey, quiet up there, will you? Some people are tryin’a sleep.”

“Sorry, Clint,” Steve tried to whisper even though Clint had effectively ruined any chance of keeping silent. He cast a glance over to the other beds. Thor was still dead to the world, Bruce was completely hidden underneath his blanket, and Tony was sprawled out on his back, a hitch in his breathing that was not normal but not enough to disrupt him. Yet. 

Natasha turned at the sound of Clint’s name. “Clint?” Steve noticed with alarm that her eyes were settled over with fog again. “Clint, I was having a dream, did you too—did you know we’re in danger?”

Clint leaned his head out from the bottom bunk so he could look up at the two of them. He wasn’t looking much better than Nat, the circles under his eyes sunken and dark. “What’re you talkin’... you mean a mission?”

Natasha nodded frantically, but Steve cut in. “No, definitely not. There’s no mission, there’s no danger, it’s time to go back to sleep.”

Clint looked like he would be all too happy to comply with that, but Natasha’s eyes were darting all over and she was starting to shake. Steve wanted to put the sheet over her but her fever was already probably through the roof. 

“Get your—your bow, Hawkeye,” she hissed. “Get your damn bow, we gotta move. It’s important. The mission. Right?”

“Natasha—” Steve tried.  _ Fury had better have more than just a hungover intern watching our security clips or I swear to God— _ “Please calm down, you’re not thinking straight.” He stopped. There was no way she was actually going to listen to him, In fact, now she seemed to be trying to scoot off the edge of the bed.

He gently held out his arms to stop her. “Natasha. You’re gonna have to at least lie down. Wandering around at the crack of dawn won’t help.”

“You’ve got a very different definition of ‘morning,’ Cap,” Clint muttered, flinging an arm over his face. “And of ‘inside voice.’”

Steve frowned. “I thought you took your hearing aids out to sleep.”

Clint made a grumbling noise and pressed his hands to his head. Steve would hazard a guess that that meant something along the lines of “yes, but I essentially passed out on the bottom bunk last night and did not have the capacity to even take my shoes off, so if you don’t understand my situation by now, that’s on you.” Not that Clint Barton was ever capable of being that eloquent, but Steve was getting pretty good at translating. 

He remembered Natasha and hurriedly turned back around, ready to prevent another escape attempt, but the first one had evidently worn her out, as she was bracing herself against the wall and blinking for so long that her eyes were closed more than they were open. 

This time she didn’t protest when he guided her back down so that her head was on the pillow. She was still giving off heat like a furnace, though, and these were the times when Steve really wished his medical knowledge was more up to date, because apparently everything they had used to do was bad and gave you cancer. 

“Sleep… now?” Natasha asked, her eyes shutting again despite what looked like valiant effort. “But… Rogers, where’s Clint again?”

“Down here,” came Clint’s muffled voice. “Where the room is spinning. Is it doing that for you?”

_ I don’t know what to do I don’t know what to do I don’t know— _ Steve shut down that thought. “I’m not sure how to help with that, unless you want me to wake up the others. I don’t remember Fury mentioning any way to contact him for medicine or anything in here—”

“No, don’t bother,” Clint interrupted. “It’s not… that bad. I'll just go back to sleep.”

“... Clint—”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” His voice was harsh, sharpened almost to its breaking point before he groaned again and lay back on his pillow. He didn’t speak again after that, and after about twelve minutes of Steve perching motionless on the side of the top bunk, Clint was either asleep or really good at faking it.

Because just what they needed was a stubborn archer right now, Steve thought, determinedly ignoring the memories of what he had been like as a kid and his mother and Bucky had tried to take care of him. Or at least stop him from knocking down the kid in the grade ahead of him because he’d _ stolen the playground ball Buck and that was the only one they had and besides it’s not like I even hurt him _ —

Natasha was even better at either being asleep or pretending to be asleep than Clint. Her eyes were closed, strands of red hair sticking to her forehead with sweat, her mouth slightly open in a bid for more air. The room was silent except for Tony coughing in his sleep in the next bed, except for the twisting of sheets as Thor rolled over. 

Steve felt his own eyelids getting heavy, and fought it—so what if he’d been sprinting up and down the streets of New York all day fighting an alien, his teammates might need him and he hadn’t really been a huge help so far—

—and the next thing he knew was a heavy, warm, darkness.

* * *

The second time he woke up that morning, it was probably not technically morning anymore, given the  _ very  _ bright light suddenly poking its way through the crack between his eyelids. He shifted so that his face was buried in the pillow.

Wait. Pillow?

Steve opened his eyes and sat up, his limbs tingling with that weird cold feeling you got when you fell asleep somewhere you weren’t supposed to. Sure enough, he was sitting curled at the edge of Natasha’s bunk, a slight indentation in the sheets showing where she had been earlier. 

“Aw, shit,” he muttered. He hoped him being in the bed hadn’t forced Natasha out (even though he’d seen her and Clint piled on top of each other more times than he could count and most of the discomfort any of them had felt around each other had dissolved by now). “I did not mean to do that.”

He hadn’t really been talking to anyone, hence the surprise when he was answered. 

“Restful sleep, Captain?”

Steve looked up to find a grinning face that he would more have associated with the god of mischief than the god of thunder. “You know what, Thor…” He let the reply die; however long he may have slept in, it was not enough to deal with this. 

Oh, to most people that would have seemed inoffensive, but that was the thing about Thor. Half the time he was either being sarcastic or laughing at you—possibly both—but he had mastered the innocent who-me-I-don’t-even-know-what-a-submarine-is (either the sandwich or the nautical vehicle) to such a degree that no one ever called him out on it. 

“What time is it?”

“It is almost a quarter past eleven.” Before Steve could digest that, Thor went on cheerfully. “Of course, I myself have been awake since the sunrise, but I suppose many years of battle will make that seem a natural habit.”

“Great.” Steve rubbed his eyes. He felt like he hadn’t slept at all, the images of his teammates’ faces playing in a loop behind his eyelids whenever he closed them, but physically… yeah, all the soreness and aching from the fight yesterday was gone. Thor moved aside as Steve slid off the top bunk. “How’s Natasha doing? And Clint and Tony?”

“A little offended that I was the last one you thought of,” came a weaker-than-usual voice from the other side of the room.

Steve turned in its direction. Yesterday, none of them had had much inclination to check out the room they were in—there were slightly more pressing matters—and in the middle of the night it could’ve been any dark, barely furnished, cube. Now, however, it was easier to take a look around. The room hadn’t gotten any bigger, but it did have room for the three bunk beds—each against a different wall—a tall dresser, a corner lined with some counters and a roundish table with six chairs, and another with a very square gray couch that did not look like it served the purpose of a couch in the least. It was as though someone had tried to make a living space, but half the list of what furniture belonged in a living space had been ripped off. Or maybe he was just used to Avengers Tower and its seven microwaves. The thing that really made it obvious that this wasn’t someone’s studio apartment, though, were the rectangular fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Nobody had those in a house unless they liked the feeling that they were under a scientist’s microscope.

_ Which we kind of are…  _

At the counter, their resident physicist was sitting and drinking something from a mug, while the very square and uncomfortable-looking gray couch held two S.H.I.E.L.D. assassins and a half-asleep engineer piled underneath blankets dragged from their bunks. Said half-asleep engineer waved as Steve’s eyes landed on him.

“The Cap’s awake. Time to end the party.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. She wasn’t looking _better_ , per se, but at least she seemed semi-aware of her surroundings. Surroundings being: wedged so deep into the corner of the couch she might’ve been trying to bury herself in it. “If this is what you call a party, then we might need Rogers to liven it up.”

“That is sacrilege,” Tony muttered. His pale and sweaty face glowed with the reflected light from the tablet he was playing with in his lap. Steve was surprised he hadn’t managed to install hologram technology on it yet.

Since he supposed he might as well get it over with, he turned to Nat. “I’m sorry about putting you out last night, I swear I didn’t mean to fall asleep.” He ignored the light of glee in Tony’s eyes.

Natasha snorted, which prompted a few coughs before she spoke. “Don’t give me that old-timey proper-ness, Steve; you haven’t defiled my honor or anything.” She leaned back against the couch cushions. “Honestly, any of the remaining boundaries any of us had probably went out the window when I almost threw up on Stark this morning.”

Tony narrowed his eyes at her and pointedly shifted an inch toward the end of the couch.

“To be fair,” Clint said, speaking for the first time in a voice that just barely sounded like his own. It sounded like his own if it had been dragged through gravel and nails, maybe. “That is an easy mistake to make.”

“Oh, screw you, Barton.” Tony attempted to sit up straighter in order to make better eye contact, but his arms were shaking against the cushions and he abandoned that plan pretty quickly.

“So this is what we’ve been dealing with all morning,” Bruce called from over at the table, gesturing to himself and Thor. “You’re welcome for letting you sleep in, Steve.”

Thor nodded thoughtfully. “The medicine those agents dropped off did make these three a good deal more alert. On Asgard we would simply have used a healing stone, but—” he shrugged, somehow managing not to look utterly ridiculous in a slightly-too-small T-shirt with a S.H.I.E.L.D. eagle printed on it, which was more than the rest of them could say “—here on Earth, you apparently just… wait.”

“Most diseases here have a cure, Thor,” Bruce said. “It’s just this one is…”

As far as he knew, the serum hadn’t given him the ability to read minds, but he was fairly positive everyone in the room was having the same memory of that sludgey dripping alien oozing onto the New York pavement. 

“... different,” he concluded.

“But I hear they’ve got vaccines for almost everything now,” Steve pointed out. He frowned. “Not the big ones, though—like we’ve still got cancer and—”

Bruce almost looked offended. “We’re working on that!”

“Oh, yeah. Definitely, I’m sure.” Something Thor had said caught up to him. “Wait, how did the agents know we needed medicine?”

Clint cupped his hands around his mouth and spoke in a monotone. “We’re in a S.H.I.E.L.D. base. We’re gonna get spied on.” Natasha tried to swat at his arm, but he rolled out of the way.

“It appears Stark here can detect your technology a mile away.” Thor grinned and Steve’s gaze fell to the tablet in Tony’s hand. “That was in the dresser.”

“Even mediocre technology as it may be,” Tony sighed dramatically, still tapping at it. “It had an emergency number programmed into it. Well, technically it had a number for like  _ emergency  _ emergencies, and one for I assume less consequential emergencies, but neither one was for Fury’s cell, so you win some, you lose—” He broke off in another spasm of coughing. Bruce immediately jumped up from the table and was there by the couch, and Natasha leaned over and gave the part of his shoulder she could reach a weak pat.

Still coughing, Tony tried to motion for Bruce to go away, but he didn’t dare try to move Natasha’s hand.  _ Neither of them would care anyway _ , Steve thought as he hovered awkwardly closer.  _ “Leave Tony Stark alone to deal with his own medical issues” was proved to be a bad idea way before the Avengers, based on what Nat said about that palladium thing— _

Sure enough, Bruce wasn’t budging, not until Tony finally managed to gasp out a breath, a hand curled over the arc reactor like he either wanted to keep it from bursting apart or tear it out of his chest altogether.

“Wow,” Tony said breathlessly after a few long moments of keeping his eyes shut. “Didn’t know… you all cared so much.” He attempted one of his trademark smirks, but it came off much softer than intended. 

“‘Course not, you’re just the one that keeps us all off the streets.” Bruce looked quickly up into Tony’s eyes and then back at the reactor, missing Tony’s half-smiling reaction. “I just wish there was something—”

Thor took a step forward, watching the scene curiously. “Didn’t the agents from earlier leave a small breathing device for emergencies?” He brought his hands up to his mouth and mimed… well, to be honest, Steve had no idea what he was miming. Either a very small trumpet or a…  _ you know what, I’m going to let somebody else ask.  _

The other Avengers just stared at Thor. 

“Come on! The little…” More miming. “Small inhaling device. In case Stark was not able to breathe.”

Steve snapped his fingers. “The agents left an inhaler?”

Thor pointed at him before turning to the others with extreme Asgardian disappointment. “He wasn’t even  _ awake _ .”

“Well, sorry if I didn’t understand your little—” Clint copied Thor’s motion. “—as the height of improvisational communication, but I’m on so many drugs right now.”

“You’re on drugstore cough medicine,” Natasha mumbled. 

“Fuck off.”

“Anyway!” Amazing, how Tony still tried to command all the attention in the room even while speaking in a hoarse semi-whisper. Even more amazing how it worked. “I’m glad this was a learning experience for everybody, but if you read the minutes from our last meeting I be _ lieve  _ we were catching our dear Captain Rogers here up to speed. Just like old times, right? Or, actually, kind of the opposite, but… yeah, anyway, S.H.I.E.L.D. had this tablet programmed with an emergency number—two of them, actually, but—”

“Uh, Tony, you told me that already,” Steve said. He wasn’t usually one to repeat himself—thoughts were either fast-tracked from brain to mouth and out the window forever or filed away to never be forgotten.

Tony was only caught off guard for a moment, a strange look passing over his face before he continued. “‘Course I did. Anyway, can we just—I’d like to bring up the fact that StarkTech designs all of the quinjets, the satellites, like ninety percent of  _ your _ guys’ weapons, basically everything… and then we’ve got this?” He waved the tablet. 

“Apple’s got better emojis,” Natasha shrugged.

Tony clasped a hand over his forehead. “That’s a low blow, Romanoff, you traitor.” 

“I’m glad you’re feeling good enough to annoy each other, at least.” Steve shook his head, but he was more sincere than he let on. He knew Fury wouldn’t be taking so many precautions with them if this wasn’t something serious… and even though the three of them were doing an admirable job of trying to cover up how awful they must have been feeling, he could tell. 

Whether this was a brief respite brought on by a straight night of sleep or cough medicine, or whether this was just the beginning of a storm to come… it was a break, and he would take it.

“I’m pretty sure that’s Stark’s constant state,” Natasha said. 

Bruce finally left the side of the couch and started walking back to the corner of the room with the table-and-chairs nook. “Hey, Steve, you hungry?”

Steve heard his stomach rumble and smiled sheepishly. “Now that you mention it.” Where Bruce was planning on getting food, he had no idea, since the room didn’t have a refrigerator or even a microwave, and according to Tony, S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were all androids who functioned beyond the mere needs of food.

(“ _ Actually, androids would be implying technological advancement _ ,” Tony had added. “ _ They’re all just aliens. And not the cool kind like Thor. The kind that tries to suck out your brains and implant them _ .”)

He looked at the three on the couch. “Any of you eat yet?”

The response was a unanimous head-shaking, accompanied by Natasha shutting her eyes, Clint turning green, and Tony leaning so far back that the top of his head was parallel to the couch cushion.

“Trust me when I say that that would not be a good idea,” Tony finally said, swallowing hard. 

“Gotcha.”

“And that is why Thor and I ate breakfast in there,” Bruce called over his shoulder, pointing to the closet door. Catching Steve’s expression, he added, “Don’t worry, it’s bigger than it looks.”

“No, it is not,” Thor muttered.

Steve cast a glance back at the three on the couch (one of whom was surreptitiously trying to reach for the trash can) and decided that following Bruce into the closet was an excellent plan. A bit of a downgrade from the day before, when his top plan had been to divide and conquer through the streets of New York to capture the alien creature, but priorities changed.

_ The Avengers did say whatever it takes. _

* * *

The rest of the day passed with both Steve and Thor learning a lot about modern Earth medical practices, even though Steve figured they didn’t exactly have what would be considered your typical patients. Other people probably didn’t have to deal with feverish assassins mistaking you for an enemy and nearly snapping your wrist or hiding above the bathroom cabinet (seriously, how did Clint even fit up there?) or giant chunks of metal lodged into your friend’s chest that made every series of coughing an event that had everyone dropping whatever they were doing (Tony did not care for this and had made it quite clear, but as that was four minutes after he’d nearly passed out trying to walk to the TV remote, nobody was really listening).

At least they  _ had  _ a TV in there, Steve reflected as he stacked up empty water glasses by the corner sink. If he thought they were frustrated now, there was no telling what they would do if they had zero sources of entertainment.

As of current, Tony, Natasha, and Clint were still sprawled out on the couch in the same places they’d been that morning, although the surrounding area was distinctly worse for wear, both pillows had ended up on Tony’s side, and several more trash cans had been placed around the couch. The TV was playing a dish soap commercial that had already played at least five or six times, but Clint was still staring at it as though enthralled, the lights reflecting back in his glassy eyes. Natasha was asleep, tucked into a ball with her face buried in the couch cushions. And Tony was still tapping away at the S.H.I.E.L.D. tablet, either accessing nuclear codes or playing Flappy Bird.

Thor was seated on the edge of his bed with Mjolnir set across his knees, keeping a watching eye on the three on the couch. Bruce was at the table with a second tablet he’d wrangled after it had become clear that Tony was not planning on relinquishing the first one, at least not until he gave it a sentient brain. His glasses were on, huge blocks of scientific text and symbols reflecting in them as he scrolled; Fury hadn’t been kidding about wanting him and Thor to assist with researching a cure for the disease. Judging from the way his hair was getting more and more disheveled as he ran his hand through it, it wasn’t going too well. 

“How’s it going over there, Doctor Banner?” Steve rinsed out the last glass and walked over to the table. 

Bruce didn’t look away from the screen, starting to tap out something. “It’s going. If I can even really say that.” 

“Wish I could help.” Steve wasn’t sure whether he should sit down or not—he wasn’t Bruce’s usual lab partner, to put it that way, but he also didn’t want to brush him off—and settled for leaning his elbows awkwardly on the back of the nearest chair.

That did make Bruce turn to him. “Steve, you are helping. And I’m not just saying that; you’re the only other one who has some semblance of knowledge on how to care for someone sick. Someone  _ human  _ and sick.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D.—”

“—wouldn’t be able to keep Tony here for three seconds without you. And in case you haven’t been paying attention to Natasha and Clint lately, they wouldn’t be either. I don’t know where we’d be if you weren’t here, but those guys wouldn’t be looking as good as they are.” Bruce finally looked up into Steve’s eyes and smiled self-consciously, as though he hadn’t planned on saying that much. “... yeah. Besides, if you weren’t here, Clint’d probably be still on top of that cabinet.”

“I’m sure you’d figure something out,” Steve said, still trying to absorb what Bruce had just said. “Although, can you even reach the top of the cabinet?”

“Under the right circumstances, yeah. Which you happen to be creating.” Bruce shot him that quick smile he always did whenever he made a joke about the Hulk, like he wasn’t sure whether he was allowed to do that. 

Steve grinned. “I guess I should change the subject, then.” He nodded at the words and symbols on the screen. “What’s the situation there?”

“I wish I knew myself,” Bruce answered. He gestured to a particular chain of symbols. “The data for this virus isn’t like anything me or S.H.I.E.L.D. or anybody’s ever seen… the subunits are still in a recognizable structure, but there are layers of genes in the virion nucleocapsid that are maybe three times as complex as we thought—I mean, if I didn’t know what it was I would’ve thought it was mutated somehow, but the readings on its DNA aren’t consistent with that—assuming DNA is even what we’re looking at—and basically this is completely unprecedented… the closest was when they tried to give Thor a blood test, remember? But even that was  _ relatively  _ humanoid even if he does have those weird proteins in his blood plasma that don’t seem to bond to any—”

“Hey, Bruce,” Steve interrupted. He didn’t think he’d ever heard Bruce say that much at once—usually Tony would have put in his own two cents by now—and it didn’t look like he was even paying attention to what he was saying, still poring over the screen. “Calm down.”

Bruce looked up. “Oh. No, you don’t need to—I’m just a little stressed, but it’s not—”

“That’s not what I was worried about,” Steve said. “I get it.” He glanced over his shoulder again at the rest of the team (besides Thor, who was now either peering into the astral realm or sleeping sitting up). “I want to help them too.”

Bruce’s shoulders lowered in a sigh. “Yeah.”

There was the sound of heavy footsteps as Thor got up from the bed and walked over to the table next to them, copying Steve’s position of leaning against the chair’s backrest, only somehow, when he did it, it looked natural. 

“Hey, Thor,” Steve said.

“Hey,” Thor echoed. His expression was thoughtful. “I overheard the two of you mentioning something about the genes of this disease, and I believe I might be able to be of some assistance.”

Bruce lifted his eyebrows. “Honestly, Thor…” He gestured to the tablet. “Have at it.”

Thor didn’t need any more convincing, leaning in to the screen immediately. “That—” He reached out a finger to tap something and startled when the zoomed-in image collapsed back to normal. “Oh. Well, what just  _ was  _ there, that makes me recall something. The creature we fought, it might be from one of the systems on Draz-Lar—now, see, that isn’t one of the Nine Realms. If it were, I would know more about it, but there are only nine, so—the creatures there have several alterations in their biology that Jane  _ did  _ call a mutation when I was telling her about some species from space.” He glanced from Bruce to Steve. “There are many people who want to hear about species from space, I find.”

“Shocking,” Steve mumbled.

Bruce tried to peer over where Thor’s arm blocked his view of the screen. “So, what would you call it, then?”

“ _ Forandring. _ ”

“Of course.”

Bruce scooted his chair over so that Thor could pull out one for himself, and the two of them started talking as they examined the data on the screen, Thor pointing stuff out and Bruce hurriedly making a note off of it. Every so often Bruce would interrupt with his eyes going wide and saying, “wait, wait, that changes everything, are you sure that—” and Thor going off about some dead tentacled being that had washed up on one of the Nine Realms four hundred years ago that was infested with something or other while Bruce kept tapping the keyboard on the screen.

Steve stayed there to watch this unfold for about twelve minutes before he moved to leave. He wasn’t sure what else he was going to do, since the other three had passed out in exhaustion, but maybe he could find a good channel or—

“Hey, where’re you going?” Bruce had spotted him.

Steve pointed vaguely over to his bed. “I didn’t want to bother either of you.”

“Wait, but we could actually use your help!”

And that was how Steve Rogers found himself copying down diagrams of viral structures (honestly, he didn’t have a clue what he was drawing, but apparently he had a better hand than Bruce or Thor, so) with a pad and pencil that had been in a cabinet drawer (in a kitchen? S.H.I.E.L.D. was an odd place) so that Thor could make his own annotations while Bruce used the tablet.

The hours ticked by with no indication of the passage of time, since the quarantine room had no windows and no lights-out-after-eleven, until they all gradually fell asleep around the table. It wasn’t peaceful—the chair was hard wood, and they were all sitting up, and every noise jolted him back awake, and Clint kept waking them all up whenever he rolled off the couch in his sleep) but Steve was grateful for it, because at a quarter to four, the three of them combined had formed a viable hypothesis that Bruce tiredly submitted to whatever S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists they were in contact with.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start, Steve thought as he folded his arms under his head like a pillow and his eyes fell shut again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	4. I Just Like Coming Here to Sketch People in Crisis

The next morning, no one could sit still. Thor was pacing back and forth from one end of the room to the other, tossing his hammer back and forth in his hand and setting off brief sparks of lightning every time he caught it. Bruce was wandering around opening and closing random cabinet drawers without looking inside—Steve had seen him sleeping last night, but you’d never know it to look at him. And Steve… well, the faucet in the shower was broken after he’d twisted it too hard and the extra bars of soap in the bathroom closet were now organized by packaging color.

_ And it was only… _ Steve checked the clock.  _ 9:03 in the morning. _ One minute since he’d last checked.

Those scientists couldn’t get the tests done fast enough.

(Although obviously, he wanted them to take their time and make sure they got it completely right before giving a cure to his teammates and everyone else who had been affected by the alien virus, but god it was hard watching Iron Man struggle to breathe, Black Widow hallucinating awful nightmares, and Hawkeye barely able to stand up)

The teammates in question had perked up a little, however, if the sound of mixed laughter and death threats from the couch was anything to go by.

“Romanoff, I swear, if you don’t get this one—”

“Then it would be your fault because my—” Natasha paused to cough into her elbow “—my skills of observation are legendary.”

“Just shut up and start already!” Clint was lying backwards, his feet sticking off the end of the armrest. Like the others, he also could easily have been mistaken to not have slept in twelve years, and to have in fact spent those twelve years getting repeatedly beaten up. Which was not too far from the truth.

Steve went over and leaned on the back of the couch right above Tony’s head. “What are you guys doing?”

Tony jumped. “Jeez, Cap, you’re gonna give me another heart attack. I’ll have to have JARVIS start playing ‘Star Spangled Man’ whenever you walk in. As a warning.”

“You came up with that so fast there is no way you haven’t thought about this before,” Natasha remarked.

“Not my fault the guy needs a bell.” Tony coughed for a couple seconds before turning back to Steve. “What was the question?”

_ Slightly worrying. _ “I asked what you guys were doing. Besides threatening to kill each other.”

“It’ll be more than a threat,” Natasha muttered.

“Stop freaking me out.” Tony turned back to Steve. “We are attempting to play a game, since there’s nothing on TV that isn’t complete garbage and it’s a million degrees in here so it’s impossible to sleep—” this was more worrying, as it was a perfectly regulated temperature in the room, and most S.H.I.E.L.D. bases actually tended to run cold, maybe as bonus training for their agents “—but  _ some  _ people just aren’t appreciating it.”

Clint shoved a pillow over his face and spoke into it, his voice muffled. “You both are taking forever.”

“That’s the point! We’re trying to pass time, Barton—” Tony started coughing again and Natasha silently moved a pile of blankets out of the way so he could sit up. “Ack.”

“Are you all right?” Steve asked.

“Oh, yeah, absolutely fine and dandy over here.” Tony glanced over to the dining corner, where Bruce and Thor had intercepted each other at their pacing and were now trying to hold a conversation while both parties were obviously distracted. “You guys figure out anything last night?”

Steve shrugged. “I’m not the person you want to explain it. Something about Thor’s space alien stuff clicked with Bruce’s PhDs and they put something together that the S.H.I.E.L.D. scientists are going to test out today on some samples from other patients. I think Bruce was video-calling a couple of them earlier—either that or he talks in his sleep. But they’ll find something, Tony, I’m sure.”

Tony didn’t answer, dark eyes staring off at the blank wall. He had tried to help Bruce yesterday—had insisted on it—but the light from the tablet screen had given him a headache in three seconds flat and even his brain didn’t seem to be clicking together ideas as fast as it normally did, caught in the fog of fever and sickness. As far as Steve knew, Tony hadn’t been at the point where he wasn’t at all aware of his surroundings—like Natasha and Clint had a couple times now—but he did wonder. Especially when he woke up in the middle of the night to see the blue arc reactor light reflecting over Tony’s face as he muttered to himself, the shadows twisting so that Steve couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or closed.

But wherever his mind was, it had to be killing him not to be firing on all cylinders. To not be able to put his brain to the task of finding a cure, even though biology had never been his strong suit. Steve knew a little something about crushing responsibility.

He cleared his throat. “So, ah, what’s the game?”

“You probably wouldn’t’ve heard of it.” Clint removed the pillow and blinked at him. Strands of brownish-blond hair stuck to his forehead. “I think it was after your, ah…” He waved his hand around. “You know, the ice.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Steve said. “But what is it?”

Natasha grinned, which for some reason only highlighted the exhausted black circles under her eyes. “Pictionary.”

Steve waited for a moment. When no explanation seemed to be forthcoming, he said, “You’re right, I have no idea what that is.”

“We’re not playing it the right way anyway.” Clint started tossing the pillow up and down, catching it every time despite it nearly falling on his face. “You need teams of two, and one person draws a picture of something while the other guesses what it is, yada yada yada. And it has been delightful doing this with an odd number of people.”

Tony smirked. “Never would’ve pegged you to be a purist for the rules of Pictionary, Barton.”

“Hey, do you know how many times I’ve played this with the kids?” Clint was still throwing and catching the pillow. “Thank god they moved on to Twister, or I would be worried about reciting the rule book whenever Fury asked for a mission report by now.”

“First off, I would pay to see that. Not necessarily to be in the room, but to see it. And second off, I’d hope that playing it with us would be more rewarding than with your little munchkins.”

“All two of you, you mean?” Clint asked lazily. “Also, I think they’d have you tied. At the least.”

Before Clint and Tony could completely derail the conversation—both of them were experts at that, and Natasha was just watching with amusement—Steve cut in. “If you needed more people, why didn’t you ask any of us to play?”  _ Sure would’ve been good for something to get our minds off… everything.  _

Clint widened his eyes at him. “Didn’t want to interrupt your brooding.” He said it like it was an obvious courtesy.

“We’re not brooding—” Steve (and the other three, although they all tried to hide it) jumped as Thor slammed Mjolnir down onto the table in the corner. The hammer could easily have gone clean through, but Thor had settled for leaving a dent, although the dark clouds in his eyes implied that he would’ve liked to do otherwise. “Okay then. Hey, Thor?”

The god of thunder rounded at the sound of his name, the hammer still swinging from his fingers and looking very incongruous with the white-lettered S.H.I.E.L.D. T-shirt he still wore. “Yes?”

Steve gestured for him to come over. “You ever heard of Pictionary?”

This got both Thor’s and Bruce’s attention.

“What?” Bruce got up from the chair and walked over to the couch, followed slowly by Thor. He peered over the top to see the scraps of paper in various stages of scribbling littered over the blankets. “Huh.”

Thor shook his head, blond hair falling into his face. Next to him, Bruce made a move as though he wanted to fix it, but stopped himself. “I do not think I am in a gaming mood right now.” His gaze passed over Tony, Natasha, and Clint, and Steve could guess what was going on behind those blue eyes; he was feeling the same way. Whatever the alien had been carrying in its slime was an unknown variable—and his team were the test subjects. He’d rather it be him… and in this group of self-sacrificers, there was no way he was alone. 

However, that was also precisely the reason he thought playing a simple game would be a good idea.

Clint interrupted his train of thought by holding up his hands in a time-out symbol. “Are you saying you know what it is?”

Thor frowned. “Of course. Jane and Darcy introduced it to me the last time I visited. Although their version had cards and drawing pads—”

“This is the knockoff S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue version, buddy,” Tony said, sweeping a hand over their wrinkled paper scraps as if to say “behold.” “And I dunno about the rest of you, but now I  _ have  _ to see Hammer Time draw what he thinks a flash mob is.”

Natasha nodded, and Bruce gestured for Thor to join him as he squeezed onto the couch. “Come on, it’ll be fun. Hopefully.”

Out of all six of them, Thor was not the one Steve would have expected to need the most convincing, but he finally set Mjolnir down on the coffee table and cleared a spot on the couch of blankets. “I suppose it won’t do any harm.”

“Yes!” Tony’s cheer became a rasp as it left his mouth and he coughed quickly before trying to cover it up. “I definitely won’t be placing any bets on your team, though, no offense.”

Thor leaned back against the couch. “You may regret that, as I will be having the good captain here as my teammate.”

Steve was surprised, but moved over to sit beside Thor anyway. He hadn’t given much thought to the actual gameplay—Clint said one person drew pictures and the other had to guess what they were? He wasn’t a bad artist, but he got the feeling that the things he was most likely to recognize a drawing of and the things Thor was most likely to recognize a drawing of were galaxies apart. Literally. 

The other teams weren’t hard to figure out—Clint and Natasha were already practically sitting in each others’ laps and Tony had flung an arm around Bruce’s shoulders. Steve looked at Thor, whose very long commute and general attitude had meant that he was really more of a battlefield acquaintance even after all these months, and prepared himself for the endless rounds of teasing from Tony after they lost. 

Natasha reached forward for one of the blank sheets of paper and a pen. “So, who wants to start?” For some reason, she looked expectantly at Steve.

“I think I’d rather watch one of you go first,” Steve said. “See how it works.”  _ Save myself from the potential embarrassment.  _

Natasha just brought the paper and pen to her own lap. “Giving up the advantage isn’t a good strategy for a captain, Steve.”

“We will not need the advantage,” Thor promised. Then, with a cheeky smile, he added, “And besides, I am clearly the team captain.”

Steve spread his hands amid the laughter. “By all means.” He sat back and watched Natasha uncap the pen and touch it to the paper.

“Ready?” Bruce had set up a timer on the tablet and was glancing between it and Natasha, ignoring Tony’s grumbling about “how come  _ we  _ can’t go first.” “And… now.”

Natasha immediately started drawing, angling the paper so that Clint could see—both of them obviously having played this game before. Steve tried to watch too, but Clint was calling out words very fast and with no particular correlation.

“Box—darkness—black box—balloon—balloon head—wait, it’s a person!—uh—the fuck?—”

Natasha raised her eyebrows meaningfully as she shaded in the outline of whatever she was drawing. Or whoever, apparently. Clint tilted his head as a few more strokes made a circle around one of the eyes.

“Are those glasses? Sunglasses? Or, wait, a monocle? Is this Coulson doing historical cosplay?”

“Fifteen seconds…” Bruce observed. 

Natasha colored in the circle around the eye and pointed to it with the pen. Clint nearly jumped off the couch.

“Fury!” he announced, his sore-throat-voice cracking at least three different decibels and making Steve wince. 

Natasha swept the drawing away and held her hand up for a tired high five. “Took you long enough.”

“I thought you two were spies,” Tony chimed in. “Isn’t facial recognition kinda important in your line of work?”

Clint settled back down on the couch. “Well, why would you draw the eye patch  _ last? _ ”

“I didn’t draw it last.” Natasha was making a tally chart, putting one line under her and Clint’s column. “You just thought it was a monocle.”

“Anyway, doesn’t matter, our turn, you’re done,” Tony said. He made a grab for the pen and paper, but Natasha whipped it out of his reach.

“Rules are if we get it right, we keep going until we get one wrong.”

“Well, that’s bullshit. No one’s ever going to get a chance with you two sharing a mind.” When Natasha didn’t relinquish the paper and pen, he frowned. “Come on. Who knows how much time I have left in this world.” Whether intentional or not, he coughed a little after that last sentence. Actually, from the way he grimaced and reached for the arc reactor afterwards, it probably hadn’t been. 

Natasha seemed to weigh her options, before tossing the paper and pen into his lap. “This is going on our cheating record.”

Tony caught them and grinned. “Pretty sure I can handle that. Bruce, you got that timer ready?”

Steve raised his eyebrows at Thor, who just smiled and relaxed back into the couch, looking about a hundred times more at ease than five minutes earlier.

Steve supposed that whichever agents were in charge of monitoring their security cameras must have been getting plenty of entertainment from this—the six Avengers playing a kids’ game together. But the ones who would normally have snarked about it the most happened to be the ones who were too sick and bored to complain, and as for Steve, Bruce, and Thor… they really were taking their distraction where they could get it until the results of the testing reached them (and who knew how long that would take between all the doctors inside and outside S.H.I.E.L.D. who were probably involved in this—for all he knew, they’d only get the news of a cure when the agents showed up at the door of the quarantine room with a needle). 

The sound of the timer startled him out of his thoughts. Tony was practically draping himself over Bruce’s shoulder, his head barely two breaths away from the scientist’s own as he waited for him to start drawing. Bruce tapped the paper with the pen a few times, looking lost, before finally deciding on something and starting to draw. His tongue poked out of the side of his mouth as he concentrated.

Tony immediately burst into a stream of words like someone had lit a firework beside him. “Circle! Longer, more oval-ish circle! Er, weird floppy balloon… sausage … Bruce, you’ve got to remember we’ve got the just and righteous Captain America watching…”

“I’m clearly drawing a head,” Bruce said, refusing to let Tony go any further. “And legs!” he added quickly.

“I believe the rules state that the person drawing is not permitted to speak?” Thor called out. Clint reached over to high five him, which the god of thunder did with enthusiasm that nearly sent Clint into the cushions.

“And here you were worried about the just and righteous Captain America,” Natasha muttered. Steve rolled his eyes.

Tony didn’t comment, however, because he was busy scrutinizing Bruce’s half-completed drawing. It was a wonder Bruce could see the paper at all with Tony’s head right in front of him. “Okay, what in the hell is that?” he muttered at last. Clint snorted with laughter. “I’m serious, is it like a four-legged duck?”

“ _ That’s its nose _ —” Bruce whispered, grinning as Thor fixed him with a stern look Steve didn’t think would ever be directed at Bruce Banner, of all people.

Natasha had taken command of the timer and was lazily tracing her finger around the edge. “Twenty-four seconds.”

“Shit, Bruce, hurry up—”

“Start guessing, then!”

“I—” Tony threw his hands in the air. “All right. Definitely an animal. I can tell that much. And you didn’t draw a bow and arrow, so I know it’s not Barton, and besides you’re too nice for that anyway. Uh… is this some weird kind of squirrel?”

Steve couldn’t help himself. “Stark, have you ever seen a squirrel in your life?”

Tony gestured to the paper helplessly. Bruce had stopped drawing and was leaning back against the couch with his arms crossed, watching his friend’s panic with a small smile. 

“It’s not  _ that  _ bad,” he remarked. Clint leaned over and squinted at it.

“Yes it is.”

“Well, you’re looking at it upside down.”

“And… time… is…” Natasha reported.

“No no no no no,  _ shit _ .” Tony was running his hands through his hair. “Is it a cow?”

“Up!” Natasha announced as Bruce dissolved into silent laughter, hiding his head in his hands as Tony made an inadvertent groaning noise. “I guess going first wouldn’t have given you much of an advantage.”

“I should never have trusted Bruce,” Tony muttered. Clint’s laughter was rapidly getting scratchier and interrupted by coughing, but he didn’t stop. 

Steve had to see this drawing for himself. He reached over and picked it up from where Tony had dropped it forlornly on the floor. It took a moment for him to figure out which way it was supposed to be held up, but once he did… oh. Huh. 

He handed it to Thor. “It…  _ is  _ an animal… do you think it’s a horse? Like a small horse?”

Thor took it and studied it. “No, I do not believe so; no hooves. I do have another idea, though—don’t you think it looks like one of your Midgardian companion creatures?”

Steve frowned. “You mean like— _ oh _ .” He took it back and passed it to Tony, who needed to be poked with it a couple times before taking it. “It’s a dog.” He looked at Bruce for confirmation; he nodded.

“Honestly, it’s one of the most well-known animals in the world,” Bruce pointed out as Tony snatched the paper, stared at it, and then tossed it back on the floor. “And it’s not  _ that  _ bad a drawing.”

“Tony thought it was a duck,” Natasha pointed out.

“Tony doesn’t go outside.”

Tony lifted his head at that. “Yes, I do—”

“A JARVIS-installed, temperature-controlled, Iron Man suit doesn’t count.”

Clint coughed one more time and cleared his throat before a smile broke over his face. “I’m still loving the fact that the one person to figure out what the drawing was was the one person who’s never seen a dog before.” He looked at Natasha. “I think Strike Team Delta’s got this one in the bag.”

“We shall see about that,” Thor spoke up with an amount of confidence that made Steve nervous, especially after watching his teammates play. “So, is it our turn now?” 

“I suppose so, if we’ve all agreed to just abandon regular turn order.”

The paper and pen were passed over to Steve and Thor’s end of the couch, and Steve offered them to Thor. “As long as you hold off on the Asgardian stuff, I think I’ve got it.”

Thor accepted. “So, no bilgesnipe?”

“No.”

Natasha tapped the tablet screen. It took her longer than it normally would, and everyone pretended not to notice it was because her hands were shaking. “And… start.”

Surprisingly, Thor didn’t start off with huge, sweeping strokes or thick boxes and buildings. In fact, he used up very little of the paper at all, the pen tip tracing over a small curved line that lay parallel to a couple others in a distinctive shape—

Steve looked from the picture to Thor, who was now drawing several others of the same shape. “I can’t believe it’s this easy, but—a banana?”

“Indeed.” Thor set down the pen as Natasha stopped the timer in disbelief.

“New record to beat is eight seconds, everyone.”

Steve nodded appreciatively, returning Thor’s offered high five, which took a little bit of super soldier strength to remain upright after. “What were you saying about Strike Team Delta, Clint?”

“All right, give me that.” Clint grabbed the paper and pen as the tablet migrated its way from Natasha back to Bruce. “Start the timer, let’s go. I’m drawing a damn stick figure in a cape.”

“Well, now you can’t.”

“Maybe Nat wasn’t listening.”

“She’s always listening.”

“Yes, she is,” Natasha agreed. “Pick something else, and whatever it is, draw it fast.” She smirked at Thor. “We have our honor to reclaim here.”

Bruce maneuvered the tablet out of Tony’s hands. “You ready? Er, I mean, is Strike Team Delta ready?” He received two nods. “Okay. You can… go.”

Clint’s hand flew over the paper, sketching a rough circle that he divided into eight triangled segments like—

Steve couldn’t even finish the thought before Natasha said, “Pizza,” and Clint’s hand holding the pen shot forward to point at her in the middle of adding pepperoni. 

“Six point twenty-eight seconds,” Bruce murmured as Clint pumped his fist. 

“That will be simple to beat,” Thor said dismissively. “I predict that the captain and I could have made it six seconds even.”

“Quit committing me like that, Thor,” Steve protested. At the smirks from both Natasha and Clint, he added, “We could have done it in five.”

“And before anybody even worries about that, it’s our turn now,” Tony interrupted, taking the pen and paper. “And I am drawing this time, and I am going to draw the weirdest goddamn animal I can think of out of  _ pure spite _ .” He pointed a stern finger at Bruce, who was trying not to laugh again. “Pure spite.”

“I started the timer ten seconds ago,” Natasha announced in a bored voice.

“And you’re all lecturing  _ us  _ about cheating. Fine, I see how it is, don’t want to risk your lead, I admire that as a businessman, Romanoff, but as a Pictionary player I have different—”

“Twenty seconds.”

“Shit.” Tony started drawing, and from what Steve could see he was true to his word; he had no idea what the inventor was trying to make. He wasn’t a bad artist—probably all those blueprints and design schematics that he liked to whip holographs out of—but this thing he was drawing did not have any wires or metal parts. It had a lumpy, fur-covered body and a wide shape curving around its head, two shaded-in eyes poking out above it.

Bruce tilted his head. “It’s a platypus?”

Natasha kept her finger hovering over the tablet screen. “That didn’t sound like an answer, Doctor Banner…”

“Come on, he said it, timer’s up.” Tony turned to Bruce. “So the data seems to show that even an animal well below the commonly-well-known range can still be recognized—almost as though it doesn’t have anything to do with the animal itself but the talent of the artist—”

“Oh, don’t even try that,” Bruce said. “What about the other variables? For example, the fact that you call Rhodey by that nickname about twenty times a day whenever he’s around and forty times a day over the phone whenever he’s not?” He adjusted his glasses. “The data’s inconclusive and the sample size is small.”

“Get a room,” Clint called through his hands cupped around his mouth. 

Tony smirked. “Good luck with that.” He gestured to the single space; four walls and a quarantine-sturdy door. “You’re stuck with us just as much as we’re stuck with you, Barton.”

“And on that note, we have honor to reclaim,” Steve said smoothly, picking up the pen and paper, which was getting full by this point. There was still an empty corner left, however, and this was where he poised his pen. “Ready when you are, Thor.”

“I have been ready since the last Convergence,” Thor said.

Natasha tapped the screen once. “In that case, your time starts now.”

It wasn’t a good time for Steve to realize that he hadn’t actually thought of an idea to draw—something that Thor would recognize and something that Thor would recognize  _ quickly _ —but he was used to coming up with ideas on the fly. It was a part of the job when one’s job was being an Avenger and the building Hawkeye was using as a vantage point had just been demolished by a hijacked bulldozer and Black Widow’s coms were offline because a lightning bolt meant for the enemy had just struck the power lines she was crouched near, and Thor was trying to apologize for that and fend off more attackers at the same time, and Iron Man was in his ear saying something about the Hulk smashing up a store on Twenty-Fourth, and could he do something about that?

And obviously a game of Pictionary was nothing like an actual battle—even if the others seemed to be treating it like one—but he still went with his instincts as the pen began to trace a straight line up the remaining blank corner of paper.

“A building?” Thor guessed. Steve nodded and kept drawing, adding little square windows and a curved balcony before beginning to shade it in.

He had an audience, too. “Huh. That’s actually not bad, Cap,” Tony remarked, peering over the edge of the paper. “If being the symbol of freedom and truth doesn’t work out, you could land something decent with that.”

“High praise.” The drawing was fleshing out before him, much more detailed than it needed to be for the game, but he had fallen into a sort of trance now and nobody else was telling him to stop—as a matter of fact, they were all watching with interest.

By the time Steve got around to filling in the skyline in the background, he figured the others already knew what it was, but Thor wasn’t guessing and Natasha was letting the timer run out. 

The final detail of the drawing was the large “A” fixed to the top of the building, rough around the edges from where other letters had been ripped off.

“Well,” he said, breaking the silence. “You all are way worse at this game than I thought.” He pointed to the drawing as the others started to laugh. “In case you couldn’t tell, that’s Avengers Tower—”

“There—” Tony started, but before he could finish the sentence, a brisk knock sounded at the door.

* * *

The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents didn’t enter the room themselves, of course. No, there were contraptions for that, drawers in the door that pulled out on either side and apparently had some sort of self-disinfecting technology that was close to top-of-the-line but still not really on the line judging from Tony’s eye roll as Thor yanked it open, but it was not to fear, as the communications system was there and perfectly functional. 

However, S.H.I.E.L.D. agents were not known for their warm and friendly personalities, so the two that had shown up on the other side of the door just dropped whatever package they had been sent to deliver inside the drawer and left.

Thor was the one who brought the package back to the couch—Natasha and Clint had both tried to get up, but gave up as Steve and Bruce pinned them with identical oh-no-you-don’t looks once they had started swaying—plopping it in front of the other five with a  _ thunk _ . “Something tells me that this is not one of your takeout deliveries.”

Tony propped himself up on one elbow. “Should’ve really thought of that, you know.” A retching cough tore its way out of his mouth and he wrapped both arms around himself. “On second thought—”

“See, I don’t blame those agents for not wanting to stay anywhere near this room,” Bruce murmured, half to himself. “But I wish they had; we could’ve asked about those test results.”

Natasha shook her head, a few curls coming loose from her messy ponytail. “They were just grunts, they wouldn’t know anything. Once the science division notifies Fury and he’s had a chance to fill out the probably endless paperwork about it, he’ll tell us.” Her eyelids slid half shut. “We’re his favorite agents.”

“Oh no. No no no.” Tony shook his head so vigorously he had to stop and squeeze his own eyes shut for a moment. “I refuse to be lumped in with your melodramatic government agency of ninja bureaucrats. I only associate with full dramatics, actually.” 

“So what’d we  _ get _ ,” Clint interrupted, gesturing to the still-unopened package. “There’s probably a knife in the drawer or—”

Steve reached over and ripped it open, letting the contents—assorted piles of clothing, apparently—tumble out around their feet.

“—or that.”

“Fury did say he would send someone to the Tower to pick up stuff for us that doesn’t make us look like we just walked in from the academy,” Natasha reminded them. She poked one of the piles with her foot. “And they were even nice enough to label them.” Sure enough, the pile she was poking had a piece of paper with  _ Romanoff  _ scribbled on it stuck on top with a circle of tape.

“I didn’t think you kept your clothes at the Tower,” Steve said. Even though—as Tony had reiterated many, many, times—the Tower was officially the base for the Avengers now and not Stark Industries, it had taken some of them a while to get fully moved in, and Natasha and Clint, at least, still had places at S.H.I.E.L.D. that none of the others were cleared to know about (Steve was pretty sure Tony knew anyway).

“I don’t.” Natasha picked up the small pile and unfolded it to reveal one pair of navy pajamas and a hoodie that was almost definitely Clint’s. Two balls of socks rolled out and onto the floor. “I guess this is all they could find.” She shrugged and started peeling off her S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue socks.

Thor finished rooting through the piles and sat back on the couch, looking disappointed but not unexpectedly so. “It is as I thought; there hasn’t been much of a need for me to wear anything besides my armor. Except that one press conference we had to do after our first battle, but that was when Jane introduced me to the process of  _ renting _ .”

“And not that you didn’t look positively godly as always, Sparks,” Tony said, reaching for the pile labeled  _ Stark _ —that was by far the largest. “But all of you have got to realize you live with one of the richest people in the country; I could’ve  _ bought  _ you fifty of those suits.”

“Well, I did not need fifty suits, I needed one,” Thor replied calmly. “And I think you’re forgetting that I am a prince among my people in Asgard and by technicality I will rule over your planet one day.”

Tony didn’t look the least bit nonplussed. “Point.” He started to poke through his pile, which was easily four times the size of everyone elses’—combined. “I’d offer to share, but something tells me it’d be a bit of a tight fit.”

Thor grinned. “I agree.”

Something hit Steve in the chest and fell into his lap; he looked up to see Clint across from him, rummaging through his own pile. When he spotted Steve, he said, “Yeah, I thought that was mine for a minute, the nametag fell off.”

Upon unfolding it, Steve understood why—both his and Clint’s piles were almost as minimalist as Natasha’s, with two or three plain-colored shirts and one pair of either jeans or sweatpants. The only visible difference—other than the sizes—were that Clint’s shirts were dark gray and black and Steve’s were white. At least the agents hadn’t packed any of the starkly early-twentieth-century clothes (“grandpa clothes,” he’d heard both to his face and not) that someone (probably Coulson) had apparently thought he’d want to wear.

He hadn’t bought any of it himself; the clothes he had now were a mix between what had been in the place S.H.I.E.L.D. gave him after coming out of the ice and whatever had gotten mixed up in the laundry at the Tower. In theory, there was nothing stopping him from buying anything himself, but he wasn’t exactly sure what his bank account looked like in the twenty-first century and he figured as long as these clothes fit him (and they did—sometimes they were even small, which had  _ never  _ happened before the serum), why should he bother replacing them?

Apparently Tony had several reasons why, judging by the way he was eyeing the other Avengers’ piles. He held his tongue as Steve and Clint changed shirts—the S.H.I.E.L.D. logos emblazoned on the chests must have been getting to more than one of them—but finally couldn’t take it anymore as Bruce unfolded his own pile.

“Right, this is getting ridiculous,” Tony declared. “I know I shouldn’t say anything, but really; I’m pretty sure I made it clear that JARVIS can place clothing orders at any store you could think of, and if I didn’t, well—there. I just did.”

“Pretty sure the Avengers aren’t one of your Stark Expo dance teams,” Clint muttered. “So thanks but no thanks.”

Before Tony could offer a retort, Bruce broke in. “And I personally don’t really see what you’re talking about.” Which, in Steve’s opinion, was just the final spark needed to light the match.

“So I’m guessing you also aren’t really seeing the fact that that jacket you’re holding is held together by  _ literal safety pins? _ ” Tony shook his head as Bruce rolled his eyes and pulled on said jacket. “You’re hopeless, all of you.”

Steve widened his eyes. “What do you mean? I just bought some clothes back in nineteen thirty-nine.” He tried not to laugh as Tony buried his head in his hands. It was very easy to get a reaction out of him sometimes—especially for Steve, since Tony (and the rest of the populated world) somehow still seemed to be under the impression that every word out of his mouth was as sincere as the national anthem. 

Suddenly, the tablet emitted a  _ bee-bee-beep _ noise from where it had been abandoned on the arm of the couch as everyone was busy exploring their clothing packages. Clearly it took at least Clint by surprise—the archer startled and nearly fell into Thor. Bruce was the one who reached over and pressed the home button.

Then he gasped. “Thor—they got the results of the testing back—that hypothesis with the prerequisite antibodies—” He gave up talking and just crossed over to Thor’s side of the couch, scrolling quickly through what must have been some monster of a wall of text.

Steve and Tony made quick eye contact, and Steve saw his own slightly disgruntled look at Thor being the one Bruce had decided to address mirrored in Tony’s expression, but both of them turned away to focus on what was now being disjointedly read aloud. 

“See, this is where it gets—they got samples from people who were already quarantined before us—but the cure wasn’t synthesizing correctly and—wait—it did  _ what _ —but that doesn’t make sense, it was supposed to—it should’ve—unless the point of regeneration wasn’t where we thought it was and the virus somehow—right—that is what—oh.” Bruce had been twisting his free hand through his hair as he spoke, and by now it was a hopelessly tangled mass. 

Thor was reading over his shoulder. “And these scientists, these agents, they didn’t have access to a triolic pulse collector?”

Bruce tilted his head. “That would be incredibly unstable to use even in a laboratory setting, and that’s assuming if you could account for the variance in—”

“We use them on Asgard.”

“What, with your magic healing rocks?” That was Clint, who had been listening intently along with the rest of them.

Thor frowned. “Healing  _ stones _ .”

“Right, how could I forget,” Clint said. “Anyway, if you wouldn’t mind translating whatever the fuck just came out of your mouths into regular words for us poor schmucks over here, it’d be real appreciated.”

“They’re saying that their hypothesis failed,” Tony spoke up. His chin was resting on the crook of his arm. “Tests failed, calculations failed, everything failed, we’re back to square one.” His voice cracked and he coughed.

Steve looked at Bruce and Thor. “Is that right?” 

Bruce’s eyes fell to the floor and he started fiddling with the hem of his jacket—no wonder it was falling apart—which did not require translation.

Thor heaved a sigh. “I did think that our idea had merit. It appears that this virus is not like anything I have ever been familiar with.” He stared up at the ceiling, the opposite of Bruce. “I wish I could go back to Asgard; enlist the healers for help. We have some of the most gifted magic users in the galaxy—” He cut himself off. “If only I did not have to remain in quarantine.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t think magic is gonna help us with this one, pal,” Tony said dryly, as soon as he’d gotten his voice back under control. “We’re looking for a cure in the realm of science.”

“I’d take anything at this point,” Natasha murmured. She was definitely paler than she’d been earlier. Steve wanted to take her temperature again, but he got the feeling it wouldn’t go over so well.

Bruce was scrolling through the end of the message again—Steve could see the text reflected in his glasses, meaning he could also tell when he’d finished. Whatever he’d read in that last chunk of words… the way he shut down the tablet and tossed it back on the couch didn’t bode well.

Part of Steve didn’t want to hear any more bad news, but the other part of him—the captain part, he supposed—knew they should have all the information. “What is it?”

That got everyone else’s attention; Thor even stopped pacing and Clint lifted his head.

Bruce seemed to be inwardly debating it with himself before his own “we-should-have-all-the-information” side won over. “There’s something else the S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors realized about this virus.”

Steve steeled himself, unconsciously sitting up straighter and jutting his chin.  _ Somebody interrupt him, please, delay it just a little longer. _

No one did. Bruce continued. “The other patients—the ones who got infected sooner, while we—er—while you were fighting the alien—they started showing symptoms sooner too, obviously. And so, it seems that, uh, there is a brief lull period after initial infection—I would guess it’s so to allow maximum potential spread and contamination—where the symptoms aren’t as… pronounced.” He looked around at the others. “That’s what you’re all in right now, that lull period.”

“And what happens once the lull period ends.” Natasha didn’t even inflect it as a question.

Bruce swallowed. “In the other patients… it’s intense. A few of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents got infected and they experienced severe hallucinations that almost resulted in injuries to both themselves and the doctors observing them. Some of the civilians—fevers, shaking, nausea, what you all are already experiencing but worse, enough to send them to the emergency room if this were normal circumstances. One of them had—I’m not really sure, either a breathing problem or a heart condition or something—and they’ve been unresponsive since yesterday.”

“Has anyone—” Steve started, not even knowing how he was going to finish the sentence, not with Tony and Clint and Natasha all right there,  _ right there _ .

“No. No deaths.” Bruce carefully left off saying  _ yet _ . “Nobody’s really sure what’s going to happen.”

“One more question.” This was Tony, his voice weak and thready, struggling to sit up higher on the couch. Steve’s heart wrenched in his chest. “When, exactly, does this lull period of ours end?” He spoke like he already knew the answer.

Bruce looked down at the tablet, then back up again, meeting Tony’s eyes. “Tonight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	5. You've Been Asleep, Cap

Steve had hoped the scientists were wrong. 

Even though he knew that all of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s decisions so far had been informed (if not necessarily morally right, they had at least been informed), even though so far everything the doctors had predicted had happened almost by the book, and even though god knew he would trust Bruce with his life… he’d still hoped they were wrong. Practically prayed it.

It hadn’t worked, though. They weren’t wrong.

That was one thought pounding through Steve’s head as he raced toward the bathroom door, his ears full of the sound of screaming and coughing, his hands searching for the doorknob and wondering whether it would be faster to just break down the whole thing:  _ they weren’t wrong. _

That lull period, that merciful, traitorous, lull period had finally broken (not all at once, in pieces and crumbling-off bits, slowly slowly slowly until no one could hide it anymore, until everything  _ snapped _ ) and Steve was terrified of where the Avengers would be come morning.

The swell of the doorknob was finally there under his hand, and he yanked it open with such force he wasn’t sure the door  _ didn’t  _ break off its hinges. That didn’t matter, though, the door didn’t matter—all that mattered right now was the man he had chased into this bathroom, the man who was currently heaving up everything that had ever been in his stomach into the toilet (the lid was down, but clearly he hadn’t had enough time—or strength—to even lift it).

“Tony,” Steve said, stepping closer carefully, carefully. He didn’t know what he was going to say next. He hadn’t planned this out, his instincts had just pulled him toward the door like a magnet.

Tony lifted his head away from the toilet, his eyes wide and wild but his mouth curved into a weak, twisted version of the trademark Tony Stark smirk. “Heyyy… yyy, Cap.” The words caught in his throat and he started coughing, a harsh, painful sound that lasted a good minute and a half.

“Hey.” Steve kept trying to edge closer, to peer around to see the side of his head, but Tony kept sliding out of the way like it was a game. The screaming was still echoing from the main room, and Steve tried hard not to think about where it was coming from. “Tony, could you do something for me—”

He stopped. There it was, dripping onto the pure white bathroom tiles. Small red droplets, staining the floor one by one, slowly forming a puddle. 

“What’re you  _ lookin’  _ at, Cap?” Tony asked. His eyes were shifting in and out of focus. “Didn’t do ‘nything. I  _ didn’t _ , Obadiah.”

Steve tried not to flinch at the sudden mention of Tony’s dead mentor; he’d known the hallucinations were coming, he’d seen Natasha and— _ never mind, never mind, focus. _

“Tony, you’re bleeding. I just need to take care of that for you and then we can move on from—from there. Okay? Will you let me?”

Steve was going to lunge over there and put a Band-Aid on wherever that bleeding was coming from whether Tony let him or not, but he would at least offer him the chance.

Tony shook his head, then winced at the resulting (Steve guessed) dizziness. His hair was sticking up in all directions, plastered with sweat, and now, blood. He broke into a new series of coughs.

“All righty.” Steve didn’t know what he was saying anymore. He eyed the door—still ajar, an easy escape route but hopefully not for someone who didn’t look like he could stand up right now—and slowly, slowly edged closer to Tony, crouching as much as he could so that his height didn’t make him into a looming invader. “I’m coming over, then. Just… just try to breathe.”

_ I’m terrible at this. What if I make everything worse? I’ve never done this before, I’ve never had training… out of all of us, why did it have to be me in here with him ( _ super soldier speed, his mind helpfully supplied) _... I’m the wrong person for this. _

This feeling was not allayed when Tony glared at him over more coughs. Steve could practically hear him thinking  _ yeah,  _ just breathe, _ really needed that. I’ll have to program JARVIS to remind me to do that whenever you’re not around.  _

Somehow he ended up at Tony’s side, searching through his mess of brown hair for the source of the blood… there. It didn’t look too bad—just a cut from stumbling and tripping in a daze of alien-virus-induced fever, that unfortunately happened to land on the hard tile floor—probably not even bad enough to need stitches, but it would still be better to bandage that up than to have it bleeding all over the place.

Tony groaned once the coughs had subsided, each of his breaths shallow and painful-sounding. He blinked up at Steve, who was poking through the medicine cabinet (this was a S.H.I.E.L.D. location, if there weren’t at least seven dozen methods of healing a flesh wound in here, he’d let Clint play Ultimate Frisbee with his shield). “... Captain America?”

“Yes?” Steve responded automatically. Then he paused, spinning around with a box of gauze pads in his hands. “Wait. Tony, could you please stay still for a minute? I’ve got to—”

“Captain  _ America _ ,” Tony repeated in a hoarse voice. He wasn’t even really looking at Steve anymore—he was somewhere else entirely. “Isn’t that gre—” He coughed again.

Steve crouched down and tried to move Tony’s hair away from the cut so that he could see it. It wasn’t bleeding as bad now, although the drying blood now stuck in his hair and part of his cheek made it look a lot worse. He focused himself on wiping that away with a washcloth, definitely not listening to the whispered babble now coming out of Tony’s mouth.

“Something... about all this seems weird, doesn’t it? It’s like… it’s like…” More coughing. “Ow, that kinda hurts now, but that isn’t weird, no it’s not… it’s a car battery, shrapnel in my—my atrial septum and it’s not coming out, right… I told you this already, didn’t I? Rhodey, are you  _ listening _ —’course you are, you’re always—Obie, are you  _ listening _ …”

“Tony,” Steve interrupted, because his head was clean and bandaged and the gauze pad wrapper was crumpled up and thrown somewhere in the direction of the trash can (it had probably made it in. He was no Hawkeye, but he got plenty of practice with the shield— _ why was he  _ thinking  _ about this, focus! _ ) and because he felt like he might either put a dent in the wall or wrap his teammate in a hug if he had to listen to any more of this and he didn’t particularly want to explain  _ either  _ of those to Fury. “Time to get up off the floor, okay? You ready?”

Tony lifted his eyebrows at him, swaying back and forth just the slightest bit, before lunging for the toilet and throwing up again.

Steve watched the ceiling and waited. “Guess not.” He winced as the sudden motion had apparently set off a whole new round of coughing as Tony fell away, sliding lower down to the floor and struggling to take in air when every muscle in his body seemed determined to expel it.

He slid over and carefully hauled Tony upright—half-remembered advice from his asthma days about keeping airways open swirling through his head—bracing his body against his own. Tony didn’t struggle against this as he might have normally—he preferred to be the one  _ initiating  _ the unsolicited physical contact—which just set off more alarm bells. 

“Thor? Bruce!” Steve tried yelling, but the screaming was still echoing off the walls of the main room, growing more and more ragged, and the other sounds hadn’t ceased either; he couldn’t make out the words, but he could tell his teammates were a little preoccupied. “Okay. Okay.” The sounds of violent coughing were changing to gasps, rough and desperate. Shit, he should be doing something— _ why the fuck was his most recent medical training primarily concerning mustard gas _ —there was that inhaler that S.H.I.E.L.D. sent, but he didn’t know where it was—

He looked down at Tony again, whose eyes were wild and frantic, his chest heaving with effort. His trembling hands grabbed at nothing until they managed to grasp Steve’s arm.  _ Time to find it. _

He went to stand up, but all of a sudden Tony slumped into him, his head lolling on his shoulder and grip going slack, completely and utterly still.

The jolt of icy cold that shot through him actually stopped his own breathing for a moment; it took at least six or seven double-checks for Steve to finally register that Tony was only unconscious  _ is he only unconscious  _ he was only unconscious.

Carefully, Steve slid the arm that wasn’t already around Tony’s shoulders so that it hooked under his knees, maneuvering him into a better position before standing up, lifting Tony with him. The unconscious man didn’t stir, his head falling against the part between Steve’s chest and his shoulder. Even through his shirt, he could feel the fevered heat radiating from Tony’s body.

He carried him through the bathroom door and into the main room again, giving the door a halfhearted kick shut. One moment he was entirely focused on the man in his arms—a bomb could probably have gone off and he wouldn’t have dropped him for anything—and then his eyes and ears were flooded with a thousand things that were suddenly happening at once.

Thor was standing in front of the door, a solid wall of Asgardian muscle covered in a S.H.I.E.L.D-issue T-shirt. Natasha was shouting something at him, something Steve had no prayer of understanding and not just because it was in Russian—it was scratchy and melded together and would every so often crack into a spasm of coughs that might not have been anything like Tony’s but were still awful-sounding. She looked ready to drop, clutching something in her hand—its silhouette was like a weapon, did S.H.I.E.L.D. let them have weapons in here—like it was her lifeline, although her arm was shaking.

Over on the couch was the source of the constant piercing screams: Clint, curled up in the tightest ball that hardly anyone who wasn’t a trained acrobat would have been able to contort themselves into, his hands pressed to his ears and his mouth open in a never-ending shattering noise. Bruce was at his side surrounded by what looked like half the contents of the medical kit dumped out, alternating between rummaging through the same things again and again and trying to calm Clint down. Steve was amazed that he hadn’t gone green by now—he had no idea the archer had those kind of lungs on him—but then again, hadn’t Bruce dealt with situations like this before?

He opted not to bring Tony all the way to the bed, instead laying him down carefully at the other end of the couch. At first Bruce barely seemed to register that he was there at all, let alone that he had just carried an unconscious Iron Man into the room and dropped him on the couch, but then Tony shifted a little and Bruce snapped to attention.

“What happened?”

“He was coughing a lot—threw up at least twice—and I don’t know how well he’s breathing right now,” Steve rattled off. “I was going to get him the inhaler—”

“Yeah, that won’t help now,” Bruce interrupted. “In the closet, second shelf, I saw an oxygen mask earlier.” He started brushing through the stacks of assorted materials littered around him and looked back up to find Steve still standing there.

“Doesn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. know about this—”

“Steve, get the damn oxygen mask!”

It was incredible how forceful Bruce could make his voice even in human form; Steve was dashing back around and to the cabinet in barely a second. Fortunately, most of the cabinet’s contents had already been swept out earlier, so the mask was easy enough to spot. He raced back and handed it to Bruce. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“That would require me knowing what to do first,” Bruce said under his breath; Steve was pretty sure he hadn’t been meant to hear it. He winced as Clint let out another long, tortured scream, as though somebody were ripping out his insides as they spoke. “Maybe—maybe try to—” He gestured in Clint’s direction quickly before returning to fixing the mask over Tony’s face.

Steve nodded, because if there was one thing he was even less qualified to do than to comfort a sick and delirious genius billionaire who was disconnected from reality, it was to comfort a sick and delirious secret agent assassin who was disconnected from reality.

Taking a deep breath, he slid across the couch toward Clint, who didn’t seem to notice him at all. Noticing the archer’s eyes squeezed shut and the hearing aids that had been ripped out and thrown away onto the couch, it was understandable why.

Slowly, Steve lifted his hand and moved it closer to Clint’s shoulder, doing his best not to react to the earsplitting screams that were still tearing from his mouth. He had barely touched the fabric of Clint’s shirt when Clint jolted away, his eyes flying open.

Steve had seen the footage of before Loki’s attack on New York, when Thor’s brother had used that scepter to effectively mind-control Clint and a number of others. In them, Clint’s eyes had been glazed with bright blue as though seeing everything through a twisted film that altered everything in front of him

The look in Clint’s eyes now might have been from that time, just with duller eyes and the result of a virus rather than a maniac Norse god of mischief. He seemed to stare right through Steve, clearly somewhere else entirely. His mouth was moving but only disjointed sounds were coming out.

Steve tightened his grip on his shoulder. “Clint? Do you know I’m here right now? Clint?”

No answer, or at least no decipherable one. He wasn’t screaming anymore, but he was clutching his head with both hands, fingers digging into sweat-soaked hair, and shaking head to toe.

“ _ Agent Barton. _ ”

Clint snapped into it, his eyes darting to Steve’s face and then away again like a cornered animal. “Cap? What’s going… what’s going on?”

Steve winced at the raspiness of his voice. “You were kinda out of it for a minute there.”  _ A lot longer than a minute _ . “Had us worried a little bit.”

“Nah. Worse happens to me all the time.” Clint coughed and cleared his throat. He was watching Steve’s lips carefully now—the hearing aids were still on the couch. “I mean it… where’s Nat?”

“She’s right over there. With Thor.”

Clint swallowed. “No. No she isn’t. She left for the… for the…  _ fuck where is he? _ ” His hands reached up to press into his head again as though he wanted to rip something out of it, and he was still swallowing convulsively like he was about to throw up.

Steve kicked the trash can that was laying on its side a little closer to the couch just in case. “He?”

“In my head again,” Clint muttered. “In there and he won’t get  _ out _ —where are they?” Whatever temporary lucidity had settled over him a few moments ago had worn off, and now wild eyes were staring into Steve’s own as Steve suddenly understood what it felt like to be on the wrong end of Hawkeye’s bow. “Where are they where is Natasha what did they do why did I—why am I—it  _ hurts _ everything  _ hurts _ make it stop—” His fingers were stabbing so hard into his hair that Steve couldn’t imagine there wouldn’t be marks. “ _ Make it stop. _ ”

Steve didn’t see anything that could be hurting him, but Clint’s hallucinating mind was somewhere other than the quarantine room right now. “Clint, Natasha’s right there, I promise—everybody’s fine.” The lie slipped through his teeth much more easily than he’d expected, especially considering that Bruce was checking the pulse of an unconscious Tony Stark not three feet away. “ _ You’re  _ gonna be fine.”

His words might as well have been spoken to the dresser for all the good they seemed to do. Clint wasn’t even looking at him anymore.

The only idea he had was not exactly proper medical practice—Bruce could scold him for it later—but he was running out of options and honestly couldn’t tell whether Clint was headed toward drawing his own blood with his fingernails, vomiting into the trash can in front of him, just passing out entirely, or vaulting up to the ceiling to escape through the air vents. So, desperate times.

Steve grabbed Clint by the shoulders and forced him to meet his eyes. Clint’s were glassy with fever and what looked like held-in tears (no he was  _ not  _ going to think about that), but they finally locked onto his own.

“Listen up, Agent Barton. We have a serious situation here and I need your cooperation. Do you understand me?” When he didn’t answer, Steve gave him the gentlest shake he could. “Do you understand me?”

“Yesssss… ‘ir,” Clint mumbled.  _ Oh, he is so lucky Tony isn’t conscious right now or he would never live that down _ .

Steve focused again. “Great. Lie down and let me get you some water.”

If Clint found anything unusual about those instructions, his brain was apparently still moving on autopilot, because he obediently flopped down on his stomach. He struggled for a moment against sleep, but his body had obviously decided that once he was horizontal that was it, and his eyes slid shut. 

Steve let out a long breath and rubbed his hand through the back of his hair. He could feel Bruce’s appreciative look behind his back, but he didn’t turn around. He had to just stand there for a moment and try to forget the images of now three of his teammates stuck in their own fevered reality.

The room was silent, and he didn’t have time to fully wonder why before Thor appeared at his side and carefully set the form of a motionless Natasha down on the couch in between Tony and Clint. They would’ve been perfect matches if Natasha’s eyes weren’t open and she didn’t look like she would be slitting their throats if she had enough energy to move one of her limbs.

“Hey, Nat,” Steve said quietly once her gaze landed on him. Her brow furrowed as she tried to place him.

“... aмерика?”

“That’s right. How’re you feeling?”

Natasha clasped her hands across her chest, staring up at the ceiling. Steve tried not to think of a coffin. “Hot,” she finally decided, and Steve didn’t blame her. When they’d taken her temperature earlier, along with Tony and Clint, it hadn’t exactly been in the acceptable range, and if they were having hallucinations now, it could only have gotten worse. At least almost enough time had passed where it would be safe to give them more medicine. “Can’t move.” She coughed. “Ow.”

“Yeah, you guys are going to have it rough for a little while,” Bruce said, coming up on Steve’s other side. “Hopefully this was the worst of it and it should pass through your systems.”

“It fucking better.” The sentence sent Natasha into another round of coughs, and after making sure neither Tony or Clint had woken up, Steve laid his hand on her arm in an attempt at comfort. She stiffened but didn’t pull away. 

“I hope for that as well,” Thor said. He sat down on the other end of the couch with Clint, the current single light casting a shadow over his face that turned his eyes into black voids. Clint was twitching like he was fighting sleep, but didn’t wake up even as Thor carefully slid a pillow underneath him.

In silent agreement, Steve, Thor, and Bruce took their seats on the couch watching over their sleeping teammates. Someone switched off the only remaining light and the room was flicked into darkness.

* * *

It wasn’t too much later when there came a knock at the door. Steve shifted around, moving his legs out from under Natasha’s blanket that had half fallen off the couch. Even in the pitch darkness, his eyes could make out the silhouettes standing on the other side of the glass. 

Bruce and Thor had noticed it too, their heads turning nearly in synchronization, but Steve motioned for them to stay where they were as he stood up and walked across the room.

He pressed his hands against the cool, clouded, glass (it wasn’t really glass, he knew—something that breakable just wouldn’t do when containing a team of superheroes) and peered through to the other side.

S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. Why was he not surprised. There was no way whatever cameras or microphones (probably both, Fury was paranoid like that) hadn’t picked up the chaos that had ensued about an hour ago. Really, the only question was why they hadn’t come sooner.  _ Any  _ sooner.

There were four of them, one carrying a black medical bag in rubber-gloved hands. All of them were staring at him.

Steve brushed his hair out of his forehead with a tired hand and forced a half smile onto his face. “Right on time, boys.”

* * *

Steve woke up with a start, his eyes feeling like they were glued shut. He was sitting upright in a hard chair (that much became  _ very  _ apparent when he moved and the side of his neck and shoulder ached with pain) with his arm draped over the back and his head pressed into the crook of his arm. When he lifted his head, there was some wetness trailing from his mouth to his elbow, and he hastily wiped it away.

Unfortunately, the serum had not made it easier to shake off sleep residue, and Steve had to rub his eyes for a few seconds before they adjusted to the bright light that most definitely had not been there when he’d fallen asleep.

Then his brain adjusted:  _ Oh shit, I fell asleep. _

That had not been the plan; he had fully intended to stay awake the whole night, just in case Tony or Natasha or Clint had woken up or their fevers returned or something even worse happened… and even if it didn’t, he’d still felt like it was his responsibility to be there anyway. As the least he could do.

_ So much for that _ . It didn’t take a genius to figure out why he’d fallen asleep--long day(s), stress, he’d made the mistake of sitting down--but he was now wondering what exactly had woken him up. It wasn’t the dawn, since the room had no windows--and besides, he had a nagging suspicion that however long he’d slept, it was much later than that.

He didn’t have to wonder for long.

_ Bam. Bam. Bam. Ba-bam-bam bam ba-bam. _

_ Bam. Bam. Bam. Ba-bam-bam bam ba-bam. _

_ Bam. Bam. Bam. Ba-bam-bam-- _

Steve sat up all the way and took in the scene before him. Everyone else was already awake (because of course they were), nobody giving him more than a glance over once they saw his eyes were open. In a somewhat interesting reversal of roles, Thor was seated at the table scrolling through the tablet, his long hair gathered back, and Bruce was lying on the top bunk of one of the beds and staring intently at the opposite wall as though the answers to the mysteries of the universe might be carved there. Natasha was stretched out over about sixty percent of the couch, her feet poking out from the end of the blanket. And Tony and Clint…

They were seated at opposite ends of the couch, holding each other’s gazes. Whether it was because they were too tired to move their heads or they were having some kind of silent competition, Steve didn’t know and frankly didn’t want to. Both of them were drumming out the beat on the hard part of the couch.

_ Bam. Bam. Bam. Ba-bam-bam bam ba-bam. _

_ Bam. Bam. Bam-- _

“What are you doing?” Steve finally asked. He wasn’t even annoyed by it; he was just confused. Maybe a little worried.

There was a momentary pause as Tony and Clint looked up at him, their hands paused mid-raise.

“Mornin’, Cap,” Tony said, or tried to. What it came out as was a rough, hoarse, hardly even a whisper that Steve would have expected from someone who’d had laryngitis for a week rather than an alien virus for two days (Not that you could really  _ expect  _ anything from an alien virus no one in this galaxy had ever seen before). He winced and gave a half shrug as if to say “yeah, I know.”

Steve shook his head. “I can’t believe it.” A furrow appeared between Tony’s eyebrows as he tried to figure out what he’d meant before Steve continued: “I thought there was nothing that could make Tony Stark be quiet for longer than five seconds.”

Tony shot him a glare that didn’t need words to convey its meaning: if there was anything around to throw and if the sickness hadn’t compromised his aim and strength, he would be tossing something at Steve’s head right about now. Clint was grinning.

“Oh, he still hasn’t been,” Natasha spoke up, and god, her voice was just as bad. She cleared her throat about three or four times, but still couldn’t manage more than a whisper that sounded like it was grating against her vocal cords. “They only started doing the--” she mimed the drumming that the other two had been doing “--as a very last resort.” 

“First of all, I’m begging you to drink some water. And, why the--” Steve copied Natasha’s drumming motion “--at all?”

“Keep forgetting you weren’t around for Queen.” Tony coughed. And didn’t stop as Bruce noticed what was going on from across the room, slid off the top bunk, walked over, and pointedly handed Tony a glass of water that had been sitting abandoned on the floor.

Tony obediently took a sip. Bruce turned to Steve.

“Morning.”

“Yeah.” Steve couldn’t even find the right response, which probably wasn’t a good indicator of how much sleep he’d actually gotten. “So, did anything…?”

“S.H.I.E.L.D. hasn’t reported anything new, no.” Bruce glanced around at the others and tried to inject a more hopeful note into his voice. “But that’s normal; sometimes it takes a while to try and isolate the exact cause of--”

Steve nodded quickly before Bruce could dive into it any further. “It’s okay, I know you’re doing everything you can. And if S.H.I.E.L.D. is too, well, that’s an awful lot of highly skilled secret agent scientists working on this, which doesn’t hurt.” Despite himself, his gaze drifted to Tony, Natasha, and Clint as well. “Even if none of them are doing too hot right now, it’s still better since…”  _ Since last night. _

_ Which I’ve decided I never want to think about for the rest of my life--even if I get myself frozen in another block of ice and there’s nothing  _ else  _ to think about--and I’m pretty sure Bruce and Thor would agree with me. _

Speaking of Thor, what was he… oh. Still over at the table. He would’ve wondered what a Norse god would be doing with a S.H.I.E.L.D. tablet for this long, but just then Natasha launched herself upright.

It was a bad idea--even she had to know it as she swayed and braced herself against the cushions--but she stubbornly remained there as every other person in the room turned toward her with mixes of surprise and concern.

“Not me,” she finally forced out, through what sounded like gritted teeth. “I’m fine.”

That was so blatantly untrue that Steve had to take a second. “Natasha, what--”

“I can’t be here anymore,” she said. She was shaking her head very quickly back and forth. “Nope. This is wasting time, this is weakness--I’m an agent, I shouldn’t be--”

“All right, I’m gonna stop you right there.” Steve stood up from the chair and walked forward, close enough to reach out and catch her if she was planning on passing out, which was looking more and more likely with every moment she spent standing. “I understand where you’re coming from, but it isn't weakness to rest when you’re sick.” He could  _ hear  _ Bucky’s voice laughing at him all the way from 1938. “When you’re sick with something from outer space that no one knows how it works especially,” he amended. “And it’s on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s orders that we’re quarantined in here, and I think the rest of us are dealing with it fine.” He shot the others a warning look. “Right, guys?”

  
Clint and Bruce murmured their agreement immediately; Tony reluctantly giving a single bob of his head a few seconds later. From the other side of the room, Thor nodded his assent as well.

“And we’re not wasting time,” Bruce pointed out. He gestured to Thor. “We’re collaborating with some of the S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors to offer our contributions, but we’re by no means the only ones working on this. I guarantee you, something like a highly contagious alien virus with an unknown origin-- _ that’s  _ where all the funding is going right now.”

Natasha’s expression turned dark. “Don’t talk to me like I don’t understand anything. I’ve been an agent for years, I’ve survived plenty worse than this, and I’m telling you I’m  _ fine _ .”

Clint raised a finger. “That last one was the lie!”

Steve was thinking that Clint was pretty lucky Natasha didn’t have her weapons on her from the look on her face, but then she stumbled. Both he and Bruce took a step forward, and Clint reached out a weak hand, but she fortunately landed on the couch. So Steve turned to Clint.

“What?”

Tony blinked suddenly--he had been trying to stop himself from falling asleep and was losing the battle by a considerable amount. “What, are we playing?”

That raised many more questions. “What?”

Tony smirked at him but didn’t answer. Thor, apparently noticing that there was something going on, turned off the tablet and wandered over to the couch with the others.

“Oh, great, the gang’s all here.” Tony tried and failed to stifle a yawn behind his hand. “Mmm. Wait, are we playing or not?”

Clint raised his eyebrows. “You want us to play Two Truths and a Lie? Now I’m wondering what was in that medicine S.H.I.E.L.D. gave you.”

“Nothing I’d share with you, Barton. And I only brought it up ‘cause you did. Who am I to judge what my teammates do in their free time?”

Steve shared a look with Thor, who appeared to be just as confused as he did. Honestly, he’d thought he was getting better at catching up on the events of the last seven decades (Nintendo made other stuff besides playing cards now and Steve was actually pretty decent at some of them, he’d found out that there was a reason people kept calling his shield a “Frisbee,” he could watch movies in color, and he’d gotten registered to vote in next month’s election), but every so often there was something new that seemed to pop up out of nowhere. 

Most of the time he wasn’t bothered by it--he figured that as long as he knew the important stuff and could look anything up on his phone later if he wanted to, he didn’t really need to be constantly asking for explanations (which was made even more enjoyable because of Tony’s reaction when Steve told him that, no, he hadn’t seen Star Wars yet, and he didn’t really think he would be interested anyway)--and, really, he was a little busy saving the world on a way-too-consistent basis. 

At the moment, however, he would take anything that would distract Natasha from the turmoil of thoughts she had sunken into. He could feel her eyes on him as he asked again. “What is it you’re talking about?”

Tony gave a dramatic sigh that turned into a cough halfway through. He coughed again into his elbow before answering. “Come on, it’s like none of you have ever been to a middle school sleepover.” He paused. “To be fair, I know none of us have.”

“Perhaps we should go for another round of Pictionary instead,” Thor suggested with an all-too-innocent look on his face. “There would be no need to change up the teams--”

Tony pointed an only-slightly-shaking finger toward Thor. “Never again.” He coughed. “I learn from my mistakes.”

“Really?” That was Clint, who leaned forward with his chin in his hands.

“Oh, fuck off. Reinvented man over here, remember? Weapons designer turned philanthropist?” Tony coughed again. “Man who is really wishing he’d built an alien-repelling field around the planet so he didn’t feel like his internal organs were trying to murder him?”

“That would keep Thor out too, you know,” Bruce pointed out.

“Exactly. Win-win. We never have to be subjected to his Pictionary horrors again.”

“Well, we’re out of paper--” Clint’s voice died on “paper” and he cleared his throat to try again “--out of paper anyway, so that’s not an option anymore.”

“Where did you guys even find paper in the first place?” Steve asked. He couldn’t imagine anything in this room was less than the absolute peak of modern technological minimalism. See: the couch made of right angles and the light coming from fluorescent boxes in the ceiling. 

To his surprise, it was Natasha who answered, curled up with her pale face half-hidden in the cushions. “In the drawer.” She jerked her head in the direction of the dresser.

Steve followed the direction, but kept looking over his shoulder even though all he could see was the top of the couch. The top dresser drawer slid open easier than expected--he almost pulled it out entirely--revealing a nearly empty inside containing a notepad with all the paper ripped out, two erasable pens for said notepad, a black comb clearly from a dollar store, and a small battery alarm clock set to military time.

He shut the drawer and turned back around. “You know, Tony, I’m starting to understand what you mean when you say S.H.I.E.L.D. agents aren’t human.”

“Now you’re finally coming around.” Tony’s voice scratched again and he frowned. “You know that feeling when you think you only need one cough to clear your throat but you’re wrong and then you just end up--” He started coughing again, leaning so far forward he was nearly bent in half.

Natasha’s eyes were closed and she barely moved as she said, “Stark, if you say one more word I am going to murder you--”

“What, in my--” Tony coughed again and grinned at her weakly. “--in my sleep?”

Natasha opened her eyes. “Do I have a reason to wait?”

Steve came back over to the couch, where Bruce had apparently decided that it was worth the risk to check the team’s temperatures again (the thermometer was the newer kind that scanned foreheads instead of needing to be stuck into the mouth, but Tony, Natasha, and Clint were all eyeing it like it could have been a bomb), probably because of Natasha’s latest bout of disorientation. Wisely, though, he hadn’t started with her; at the moment he was hovering over Clint, who was giving him a look so deeply suspicious that you’d never believe the dozens of times he’d unhesitatingly trusted the Hulk to vault him over a pile of debris during a fight.

“So, you were right, Clint,” Steve said as he sat back down. Clint flicked his eyes toward him for a second and then back to the thermometer Bruce was holding over his forehead, waiting for the beep. “We don’t have much in the way of entertainment right now.”

“Hmm.” He wasn’t sure if that meant Clint was listening or not, but Bruce was stepping away, his face showing the slightest hint of relief as he read over whatever was on the thermometer. If the scientist noticed Steve and Thor watching him, he didn’t let on, simply moving over to Natasha.

“I still do not understand what the game of truth and lies you all were talking about is,” Thor said, scratching at his beard. “Unless it is anything like the one we played as children on Asgard, which I somewhat doubt as nobody mentioned any knives.”

“I think you should tell me about your Asgard-whatever parenting methods sometime,” Clint said. Apparently he had recognized that the danger of his temperature getting taken had passed--Bruce was taking Natasha’s now--and had relaxed again, although he had to pause to cough a few times. “Sounds way more efficient than time-outs.”

Thor appraised him. “True enough. Can Midgardian children survive spear wounds or getting thrown into pits of fire?”

“ _ What  _ was that--” Steve started, but Clint was already tilting his head like he was thinking it over.

“On second thought, and no offense, I am now remembering Loki’s… well, Loki’s everything about Loki, and I think I’ll pass.”

Thor shrugged and Steve spoke up. “I mean, when I was a kid they basically let us run wild in the street and hit each other with sticks, and look at me now.” 

It was the perfect opportunity for Tony to get in a jab at him--Steve was so used to it by now that several ideas had even jumped into his own head--but instead he just continued to lay motionless on the couch, keeping the one eye that was still open fixed on Bruce in case the thermometer came any closer to him.

The instrument let out a small beep that had Natasha’s eyes narrow (she looked too exhausted to do anything else, if Steve was being honest). Bruce held it up so he could see and frowned, but he managed to brush his expression clear before any of them could demand answers.

As Bruce leaned down to take Tony’s temperature, he suddenly stiffened. Steve wasn’t the only one who snapped his head around, but it was just a hand reaching up to weakly pat the top of Bruce’s head.

Tony’s eyes were just ever-so-slightly out of focus and they seemed to be drifting shut and open and shut as he studied Bruce with as much criticism as his virus-ridden self could muster. Which was not a lot, as evidenced by the next words out of his mouth, which were: “Hey, Bruce… always won’red… how come the Hulk’s hair is straight when yours is so…” He seemed to be searching for the word, his hand still resting on top of Bruce’s head. “... fluffy?”

Bruce straightened up quickly, letting Tony’s hand fall limply back down, but it was too late; everyone had heard and Thor and Clint were beside themselves with laughter that in Clint’s case quickly became coughing, but he didn’t seem to care much. Natasha had a hand pressed over her mouth and Steve’s face was cracked into a grin that he could  _ feel. _

Tony looked confused about the others’ reactions, but that only lasted for a brief moment before his eyes were determined to stay shut this time and he gave a small exhale. Bruce was now very interested in the readings on the thermometer, but Steve spotted the quirk of his mouth that he couldn’t hide.

“Maybe more sleep isn’t a bad idea,” Steve decided, still grinning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	6. Incoming Call: Fury, Nicholas J

The screen in front of him staticked for a moment before connecting; his new view was of a nondescript blank wall and the top of a blanket-covered mattress. The sound didn’t seem to have caught up; S.H.I.E.L.D. technology was good, especially in the communications department (it had to be), but there was no such thing as a perfect system, try as he might, and video calling was definitely not up there.

“Director.”

Oh, yes, and his view was also now of Captain Steve Rogers. Or at least the upper thirty or so percent of him. His hair was wet from the shower and he had the look of someone who’d been grabbing bits and pieces of sleep whenever and wherever he could for the past few days, but he still had a soldier’s training and wasn’t letting any of that show.

Nick Fury nodded. “Captain. Late night?”

“Couple of nights, actually. That ‘low point’ Doctor Banner was talking about seems more like a canyon.” Rogers straightened up. “But we’re handling it. I think Agent Romanoff even actually slept last night.”

“That’s always good to hear.” Nick glanced at the notes open on his lap. He’d been getting regular updates, both about the Avengers and the other civilians who had gotten hit with the virus, and recovery was seeming slow but steady. 

Which was about time, in his opinion. Having to send out a non-superpowered operations team whenever another mission was needed was bringing back unpleasant memories of the days before the Avengers had come along; it took a hell of a lot longer to get things done, even if there were less destroyed public property and less of the obligatory one-upmanship.

“This latest report from Doctor Banner states that most of their more extreme symptoms have lessened or gone away entirely, including the disorientation, dizziness, nausea, and more severe fever. Does that sound accurate?” After a nod from Rogers, Nick continued. “However, when filling out the standard checklist, he checked ‘yes’ to still requiring the use of an oxygen mask.”

Rogers winced. “That’s really just for Tony at this point. Arc reactor, and all—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Nick waved his hand. “I’ve been getting about sixty emails a day from Pepper Potts—plus a decent handful from Colonel Rhodes.” He had initially been surprised on not receiving anything from Jane Foster, but after second thoughts, and considering how much he knew about her relationship with the god of thunder (too much, he decided), it was entirely possible and even likely that she didn’t know he was on Earth at all, let alone quarantined at S.H.I.E.L.D. with the other Avengers. “So this is entirely on their behalf that I ask—how are they _doing?_ Beyond the medical.”

“Uh… they’re improving.”

There was a burst of noise, and Nick looked around his office for the source before realizing it was coming from Rogers’s end of the call. It sounded like something had crashed, and Rogers dropped his head into his hands just as voices that were definitely Stark’s and Barton’s erupted into an argument, all of which was punctuated by Thor laughing loudly in the background.

“—in... some... ways… hold on.”

The screen suddenly wobbled and went a fuzzy black—Rogers must have dropped the tablet on the bed—and Nick listened as the distant sound of Rogers yelling, “Do you guys mind quieting down for two minutes? Fury’s on the line.” There was more laughing and another, more muffled, voice that Rogers answered. “Not sure. Come over.”

There was the sound of a mattress creaking and then the screen was tilted upwards once again, displaying a brief view of the ceiling before it settled again on Rogers, who was now joined on the bed by Bruce Banner.

“Sorry about that,” Rogers said. 

Nick slid his phone back into his pocket. “At least they have their energy back.”

“That they sure do,” muttered Banner. He was half in, half out of the camera’s view, and whether intentionally or not kept ducking even further out of it. A few of the other agents had clearly been surprised when Nick had told them he was putting the Hulk in a small enclosed space with some of their most valuable assets, but once he’d explained the possible results of separating them, it had been significantly easier. “So, Director, I’m assuming you’re calling about progress on a cure?”

“I was calling about progress of your teammates, but while you’re here, why not.” That wasn’t entirely true, but he hadn’t been made the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. for being honest all the time. “Do you have anything to add on the reports the doctors gave?”

“Unfortunately not so much. A few of the scientists have been able to start identifying possibilities for a few of its enzymes, but from everything Thor’s said, I don’t think there’s really—well, really much of a chance to target specific nucleoproteins of the virion capsid unless they’re _significantly_ easier to separate than they look.” Banner looked quickly up at the camera. “But you know this isn’t really my area of expertise.”

There were footsteps from the other end and a deep, vaguely British-sounding-but-not-really voice from somewhere off camera. “Because there aren’t any explosions?”

“My job isn’t just explosions, Thor. Actually, when I do it right, there _shouldn’t_ be any explosions.”

There was a pause as Banner was looking expectantly between Rogers—who was suddenly very interested in the ceiling—and the off-camera Thor, who was doing who knew what. 

“Ah,” Thor finally said. “Really?”

Banner sighed. “Thanks.”

Times like these were what made Nick’s job a lot harder. Not the fooling around—anyone who’d ever been in charge of more than a high school kickball team knew that it was human nature to mess with each other during any downtime, and he didn’t see any reason why that would change just because the people in question happened to be able to throw cars across city blocks and shoot repulsor beams from their hands (as he kept telling the higher-ups)—but the moments that made him remember that these weren’t just an initiative, or a specialized unit, or whatever the public relations people had decided to call it the most recently to avoid putting “superhero” on an official form… they were people, and some of them technically still civilians at that. 

Usually he could put all that aside—it was his job to be able to put all that aside—but it was one thing when the mission was to go shut down a weapons lab or fight enhanced moss creatures or something, and another thing entirely when he had to tell them to stay put and hope none of them would get killed by a disease from outer space.

Because he did like the Avengers. Nobody believed it, and he sure wasn’t planning on announcing it, but he did. They had been his idea in the beginning, after all, and even though things had changed a bit from there—he hadn’t exactly planned for the thunder-wielding alien to join up for longer than it took to defeat his younger brother, and definitely not that he would have a standing room at Stark Tower—he did still want to protect them.

“Captain, you mind passing that tablet along?” Nick asked. “I’d like to see how the other Avengers are doing for myself.”

“Sure thing.” The screen wobbled, and Rogers’s voice could be heard yelling, “Hey, Nat, heads up!”

Then came a dizzying blur of colors as the tablet must have been thrown across the room like a Frisbee—or like a shield—until it was caught abruptly with a snap. There were mismatched views of fabric and skin until Agent Romanoff had steadied the tablet in front of her face. She appeared to be lying sideways on a couch, propped up on one elbow, her red hair pulled away from her face in a short ponytail. True to the reports, she was looking better, although the shadows under her eyes were darker than he’d like them to be.

“Did you miss us that badly?” she asked, a smile pulling at her lips as the sound of someone protesting “ _you could’ve just_ handed _it to her!_ ” accompanied by laughter was audible in the background.

Nick leaned back in his chair. “We’ve had to switch in the delta agents.”

“Wow.” Romanoff winced. “Worse than I thought.”

“How’s the situation treating you?”

“Symptoms are almost gone, although I’m going to have to be in the training room for a month,” Romanoff rattled off. “Fever’s been reduced to moderate, I can breathe functionally… really, the main problem is that this place only has one bathroom and someone is in the shower all the goddamn time.”

“Not my fault!” Rogers called from off camera.

Romanoff turned her head to yell back at him. “You don’t have to brag about living through the Great Depression, you know!”

“It’s the military training, actually.”

“Either or. But it doesn’t really matter, since Thor takes enough time to make up for five of us anyway.” Romanoff rolled her eyes, but it was her “what-am-I-going-to-do-with-them” eye roll and not her “I’m-three-seconds-away-from-changing-my-identity-and-moving-to-Siberia” eye roll.

Nick didn’t have time to answer before there was another loud crash—yes, from their end. He was alone in a secured office, any suspicious noises were not coming from his side of the call.

“I’d ask what that was, but…” He left the pause on purpose as Romanoff rolled her eyes a second time and leaned over off the back of the couch, the tablet dangling from her hand. It must have been swinging back and forth ever so slightly, because all Nick could see was a quick view of the floor right outside the open door to the bathroom—then a messy pile of what looked like bars of soap scattered all over said floor—then the figures of Stark and Agent Barton as they had fallen over themselves on the floor laughing. Stark’s hair looked like it had been through a tornado and Barton was dressed in only a pair of plaid pajama pants that Nick highly doubted belonged to him, and they weren’t helping their appearance of general disorder by the way they were pointing accusing fingers at each other and trying to speak around laughter.

Then Romanoff’s voice from somewhere above the tablet screen. “I _know_ this isn’t the first time we’ve told you two to shut up and play nicely.”

Barton looked up at her, still grinning. “Aw, come on, Nat. It’s Jenga, there’s no way to play nice.”

 _Jenga with the soap bars. That’s a new one._ Nick knew the quarantine rooms at S.H.I.E.L.D. were fully stocked with most non-perishable necessities, and unfortunately, Agent Barton liked to get inventive with entertaining himself using said necessities (He’d been sent to quarantine at least twice before that Nick could remember: once after getting bitten by something they thought had been mutated before they ruled it out, and another time after a mishap with experimental drugs that both he and Agent Romanoff had… adverse reactions to), usually leaving them completely decimated by the time he was out. Yes, this was almost definitely his fault. There was no way Tony Stark had grown up playing with any board game other than a circuit board.

Stark ran a hand over his face before pointing it at Barton. “It’s all his fault, you know. He’s a bad influence.”

“And yet I won.” Barton appeared very pleased with this fact.

“Listen, I _know_ you blew on it, you little fucker—”

“I don’t _need_ to cheat when I’m playing against you—” Barton and Stark held a glare at each other for another moment before Stark’s beard twitched and suddenly both of them were laughing again.

Romanoff turned back to the camera. “Was that enough for your report, Director?”

“Almost.” Nick gestured to Stark and Barton. “I know how you two are doing symptom-wise—”

“Threw up nineteen times last night!” Stark rearranged himself on the floor so that he was leaning back onto his palms. The arc reactor glowed through his shirt. 

Romanoff made a scoffing noise. “Twice.”

“Huh. Felt like more.”

“—so how are you doing in terms of handling the situation?” Nick finished.

Stark frowned. “This is a required question on some checklist, isn’t it… because you know we can just say we answered and that we’re doing fine and we can move on, right? Didn’t expect S.H.I.E.L.D. to be so—I don’t wanna say effusive—”

“Have you considered that I might genuinely want to know?” Nick asked, swiping away the tab of the checklist he’d had open in his phone.

“Oh, all the time. Keeps me up at night. To answer your question, though, I’m doing just fine as always. Developing my skills in meaningless board games. Throwing shit at the wall. And how could I forget the team bonding.” Stark turned to Barton. “What about you, you got anything to add?”

Barton had been signing something that had Romanoff struggling to hold the camera steady behind Stark’s back, but he smoothly pretended like he had been stretching before he answered. “Think you covered pretty much everything. Only when I throw shit, I actually hit what I was aiming for and not the wall.”

“Maybe I was aiming at the wall, Tweety Bird. It is rather unflattering when you look at it, honestly. Very bland. Needs some pizzazz.” 

Nick’s phone buzzed in his lap. “Not that I’m not disappointed to have to wrap this up, but I do have a full-time job besides superhero wrangling, so I’ll give you the rest of the news and be on my way.”

“Rest of the news?” The camera view was suddenly obscured by Romanoff’s head. “I don’t think you mentioned that.”

Nick rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Get the others, then.”

Romanoff didn’t even need to call them; apparently the two spies weren’t the only ones on the team who eavesdropped. Rogers, Thor, and Banner appeared behind the couch so fast it was though they had teleported—Thor immediately stretching out on top of it, Rogers sitting next to Romanoff, who yanked one of the pillows out from underneath him, and Stark patting a spot of floor next to him until Banner sat down. In less than a second, Nick was facing all six Avengers in various states of interest, nervousness, or trying to appear like they weren’t either of the two.

“Calm it down, it’s not anything serious,” Nick said. “I thought you’d like to know that after we got you all settled in here, one of your Asgardian pals showed up to ‘take care of’ the alien who caused all this—I believe she said her name was Lady Sif, and I assume she took it either back to Asgard or to some bottomless space pit. It doesn’t really matter to me, as long as it’s out of here.” He paused and gazed around the group. “Also, she told me to say hi to Thor for her.”

Thor nodded gravely. 

“Some of the doctors didn’t want me to tell you this part—said I’d get your hopes up—but as I’m running S.H.I.E.L.D. and not a cheerleading squad, I think you should have some of the information.”

“Not all of it?” Stark asked, before answering himself. “No, of course not; that’d ruin your whole mystique. Although we do already know that Rogers looks good in tights.”

Rogers raised his eyebrows. “Jealous?”

“Am I going to regret my decision?” That was apparently all Nick needed to say to shut them all up, because barely a half second after the words were out of his mouth, the audio bar of the video call went completely gray. “Good. According to the analysis of your most recent samples, it seems that almost all traces of the virus have left your systems. The exact levels vary among the three of you—and among all the other patients—but a best-case-scenario estimate would give you about another week in complete quarantine.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Banner was the first to react—everyone else was staring with wide eyes and what looked like furiously working brains behind them. “Oh, thank God,” he muttered, letting his head fall back and covering it with his hands.

Stark poked him. “You could at least pretend to like spending time with us, big guy.”

Rogers reached out a hand to tilt the tablet toward him. Romanoff subtly tilted it back, but he didn’t seem to notice. “So what would be the worst-case scenario, then?”

Nick supposed he should’ve expected that. “Worst-case scenario is that it turns out the virus is only dormant and you experience another flare-up within the next three to four days, possibly even more severe and with an increased chance of killing you.”

“Thanks,” Barton muttered.

His phone buzzed again; he could feel the vibration even through his pocket. “On that note, I do have to leave. As much as I hope this arrangement doesn’t have to be a regular thing, I rarely get what I hope for. So be prepared and don’t kill each other.”

As he reached out to press the “end call” button, the last words he heard before the screen went dark was Romanoff saying “There goes that plan,” Thor waving, and Stark raising himself up to say, “I’ll be sure to write!”

Avengers. There was definitely a reason they mainly spoke over the coms.

* * *

The best-case scenario did not end up happening, but then again, neither did the worst-case scenario. This was S.H.I.E.L.D. they were talking about, so what happened instead was what Steve mentally dubbed the paranoia-scenario. 

The paranoia-scenario consisted of Tony, Natasha, and Clint being symptom-free for an entire eight days ( _no, headaches from Tony’s music do not count as symptom resurgence, and actually, Tony, you’d better turn that off before you screw with the data. Thor can find something else to dance to_ ) and only after the ninth day did Fury even bring up letting them out of quarantine. He did that on one of his “checking-in” video calls that always seemed to happen when Clint and Natasha were having furious sign language arguments while crouching on the top of the cabinets, or when Thor was sending Mjolnir to zoom around the room while Tony and Bruce threw stuff in the air for it to ram into, or when their makeshift training routine that mostly consisted of Steve and Thor lifting various large pieces of furniture with the other four balanced on top failed spectacularly in a way that Steve could only explain it to Fury as “Tony said he’d pay for that.” 

Yeah, Nick Fury definitely had his own superpower. And yet he never mentioned a word about it, not even when Mjolnir very obviously streaked past Steve’s head during a call to be followed by a crash from off camera and Clint yelling “What the hell, man?” Steve was pretty sure the director just liked to watch them squirm. 

Eventually, though, once their teammates had been sufficiently tested for any remaining traces of the alien virus (“They’ve gotta have tested us at least thirty times by now,” Tony had complained. “Forty-seven, actually,” Clint had disagreed. Natasha hadn’t looked up from the tablet in her lap before saying, “It was five, you big babies”) they had been determined to have a clean bill of health. The moment he’d heard it, Steve had felt a weight the size of the Hulk lift from his chest.

Thor had slung his arm around each of them, prompting Tony to protest that he was going to squish him, and Bruce and Clint had both let out involuntary sighs of relief, but it was Natasha whose first reaction was to ask: 

“So when do we get to go home?”

Steve had braced himself, but had to run it over in his head a couple times after Fury had said, “Actually, I don’t think any of the S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors would be up my ass if I let you go now. I know you’ve all been in that room long enough.”

Tony nodded fervently; Bruce muttered something under his breath that had Natasha laughing.

“But,” Fury continued, and everyone went still again. “I didn’t get to the position that I’m in by taking unnecessary risks, and as long as the world still seems to be in one piece, I’m thinking that you should all stay just one more day.” He said “I’m thinking,” but the expression on his face said “This is my decision, don’t argue with me unless you want it to be another week.”

“Sounds fair,” Steve had said, and thank god none of the others had said anything else, because the call was able to end smoothly and they were left with an extraction time of four P.M. the next day.

Barring any massive complications, obviously.

* * *

The next morning, when Steve woke up, he felt like a pile of rocks had crushed onto him while he’d slept. His eyelids were determinedly stuck to each other and there was a hollow feeling at the back of his throat. 

Groaning, he rolled over and upright so that he was sitting on the edge of his bunk, squinting at the ceiling light and suddenly very aware of the fact that his sheets were slick with sweat—which was odd because it was _freezing_ in here.

 _Some underpaid assistant must have missed the memo that it’s November and turned the air conditioning on during the night._ Very unfortunate, given how really none of the team liked the cold very much—except Thor, but it was pretty hard to find a situation he _couldn’t_ tolerate. Oh, yeah, and Clint—for some bizarre reason that Steve couldn’t decide if it was a holdover-from-the-circus thing or a farmer thing or a secret agent thing or just a Clint Barton thing—liked to stand out in pouring rainstorms, but they’d learned not to question that either. 

He untwisted his legs from the sheets—he must have really been tossing and turning that night, although he couldn’t recall any specific nightmares—and swung them off the bed, checking that Thor’s head wasn’t directly beneath him. _Ow._ Twinges of pain were shooting down his muscles when he moved, which was… not really normal. Not normal for 2012 Steve Rogers, at least. 

_I must’ve slept weird_ , he thought, even though from the way he still felt a layer of exhaustion clinging to him, he wasn’t entirely positive he had slept at all. 

His feet hit the floor, which might as well have been made of pure ice, and made his way over to the meal area (they’d decided that it didn’t deserve to be called a kitchen and that even “dining area” was a bit of a stretch. This was shortly before Natasha had said that who _cared_ what it was called, it was time to have dinner already) where the others were already gathered. 

Or most of them, anyway. _Wait._ His vision must still have been blurry from sleep; only four of the others were there. Or was it three? Six?

“Hey, look who decided to join us!”

_Okay, at least one, because that’s Tony._

He nodded in what he hoped was the right direction. “Mornin’.” His voice came out a lot quieter than he’d planned, and now his vocal cords were rubbing together painfully. 

Tony didn’t seem to notice. He was sprawled out on one of the chairs, the plate in front of him empty except for crumbs, so he was clearly only still at the table for interaction. “They’re being nice to us today, did you see? We’ve finally ran out our doses, so we get to eat normal food again—and they brought bagels. You want one? There’s a couple different kinds, I think, but do not take the cinnamon one because we might just be visited by the wrath of a god. Of thunder, that is.”

Steve blinked. He hadn’t moved from his spot and he definitely couldn’t handle that many words thrown at him at once. “Um.” Something in the back of his throat seized and he had to bite his lip to keep from coughing. 

_I must_ really _not have slept well last night._

“The blueberry ones are mine, by the way,” Natasha added. She was lounging on her own chair and using another as a footrest. Clint was next to her eating a banana upside down. “But we can negotiate on splitting if you want.”

“No, thanks, I—” Steve said. “I’m not really hungry right now.”

She shrugged. “More for me.”

It was then that Steve spotted Bruce, who was hovering in the corner, looking even worse than he usually did after a Hulk transformation. The shadows under his eyes were enormous and he was practically swaying on the spot, clutching onto the mug in his hand like it was his only lifeline. 

Bruce caught his gaze, and to Steve’s surprise, his expression mirrored his own.

 _I know I’m tired, but surely I can’t look_ that _bad._

“Oh, yeah,” Tony said, leaning backward on his chair so that two of its legs lifted off the ground. “Did you happen to see Tall, Blond, and Handsome on your way in? Because once he wakes up, I’m going to laugh at him for all those times he was talking about ‘a real warrior trains at dawn’ or whatever that bullshit was.”

“You’re not exactly the model for discipline yourself, Stark,” Clint pointed out.

Tony held out his hands. “Yeah, but I don’t claim to be. That’s the thing. It’s false advertising. So, did you?”

Now his focus was on Steve again, and couldn’t he _leave him alone_ for _five seconds_ so he could get himself together?

“Uh. He’s still—he’s still asleep.” Steve had to stop and clear his throat halfway through. All of a sudden, he could feel Natasha’s eyes on him like a hawk—even more so than the actual Hawkeye. Shit. 

He pleaded with his eyes for her not to say anything, but this was Natasha Romanoff, and although he could trust her to keep secrets about practically anything, this was not one of them. 

“Say, you don’t sound too hot, Cap,” she remarked, almost lazily. He would have shot her a death glare if they weren’t in front of the others, but he didn’t even have time to contemplate it before Tony’s gaze was shooting toward his own, noticing him in a way he hadn’t noticed since he’d walked over. 

“Shit, she’s right. Did you sleep at all this past… week?” Tony stood up and started near him, but Steve backed up. 

“I’m fine.” He held eye contact, even though it was rapidly becoming harder as Tony got closer and his vision was blinking in and out with a gray haze settling over everything. He just needed to sit down. Right? That was it. It had to be. 

Tony had to lift himself onto his toes to peer into Steve’s eyes, but the moment he did, he shook his head and backed down. “Nope. That you are not. Were I in a competitive mood, I would say enter this into the ‘Times I Was Right and Steven Rogers Was Wrong,’ but…” He reached out to touch Steve’s arm, but Steve moved away before he could. “Yeah. Not really feeling it today.”

“Tony—”

Natasha was suddenly on her feet as well, on Steve’s left while Tony was on his right. “So what is it? I know there’s not a lot that can get past the serum, but is there any chance this is anything but the virus?”

“Not with our luck,” Clint put in from his chair. 

“You’re not helping, you know that?” Tony said conversationally. “Hey, big guy, come be helpful. What do you think about this?” He turned to Bruce, who hadn’t moved or even reacted when the others had noticed Steve. “Hey.” He snapped his fingers, and Bruce started.

“Sorry, uh—” He coughed and tried to hide it behind his hand. Steve winced in sympathy. “—what?”

Tony’s eyes widened, apparently taking in Bruce’s general state, which at the moment looked like he was barely staying upright. Actually, as Steve tried to focus his own gaze, he could’ve sworn Bruce was shaking ever so slightly. “Oh, not you too.”

Bruce shook his head, but was interrupted by more coughs that he attempted to suppress. “No, I’m not—anything, it’s fine—”

“Why is everybody _being_ like this today?” Tony let Steve go with a last pat somewhere above his elbow and headed over to Bruce, who seemed to be trying to melt into the wall. “I feel like it’s seriously undermining the mutual trust we’ve built up after all this time. I’m disappointed in all of you. You too,” he clarified, pointing at Natasha and Clint as his other hand came up to rest on Bruce’s shoulder. Bruce made a halfhearted attempt at shrugging him off, but Tony only tightened his grip. “You’re both supposed to be these superspies. What gives.”

“We’re off the clock,” Natasha said flatly, and a moment later Steve felt a cool hand against his forehead that surprised him so much that he didn’t even try to protest. “Yeah, he’s burning up.”

“Leave—” Steve started.

“Not surprised,” Tony interrupted. “Honestly, guys. This is making me rethink the welcoming environment I’ve been projecting. C'mere.” The last part was directed at Bruce, who he sort of tugged over to a chair despite the continued resistance. 

“So are we calling S.H.I.E.L.D.?” Clint asked. He was standing now, but kept turning his head from Natasha and Steve to Tony and Bruce as though he didn’t know which of them needed him more. “If this is the virus—”

“No!” Both Steve and Bruce practically yelled it at the same time. Steve actually felt his voice crack and go hoarse, and _wow_ , why was the floor tilting like that? 

“You really can’t take these guys anywhere,” Tony remarked. Bruce finally shoved his arm off of his shoulder, only to immediately stumble into the counter, where he shut his eyes for a long moment. 

Natasha smirked at him. “Hypocrite.” 

“Exaggeration.”

“So your first instinct after getting diagnosed with a disease from outer space _wasn’t_ to saunter off back to the Tower? Because if that’s true, then—”

“All right, all right, but just let me set one thing straight: I do not saunter, I stride.”

“You can’t tell S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Steve finally managed to choke out. His head was pounding like Thor was repeatedly taking his hammer to it. “I can handle this by myself, it’s really not a big—” A cough caught in his throat and he had to stop.

“They’ll overreact,” Bruce picked up, his voice thready and weak. “Keep us in quarantine for who knows how long and you guys are so close to being done, just—”

“ _Hell no_ ,” Tony broke in. “First off, the point of a quarantine is to stay in it until you aren’t exhibiting symptoms anymore, which I’d think would ring some bells for you, Doc. If you guys got the virus, there’s no way we would even _consider_ leaving, like that’s just not an option anymore and you know what? I am perfectly okay with that if it means that you two are getting halfway decent medical attention from the only creepy spy organization on Earth who has the slightest idea of what to do with alien shit—and rethinking that sentence, it sounds like a net negative, but it’s not. Okay? We’re a team. That’s how this whole arrangement works. That’s how I feel, that’s how I’m fairly certain Widow and Birdbrain over here feel, and that’s how Thor would feel if his lazy ass wasn’t still in bed—”

Clint started. “Thor?”

“Yeah, that’s what I just—”

“No—” Clint didn’t need to explain a few seconds later, as Thor came stumbling out of his bed and over to the food area.

Steve had been holding his breath to see if he’d gotten it too, but it only took a single moment to know; Thor looked like somebody had been using him as a punching bag for several consecutive nights—his eyes were half-lidded and he was swaying from side to side, an exhausted grin seeming to light up the bones in his face from the inside. 

“Friends!” he boomed with somewhat less of his usual fervor. “How are you all this morning?”

“Some better than others,” Natasha said, sizing him up. Her hand still lingered in front of Steve’s face. “And it looks like you belong in the second group.”

Thor frowned. “What?” He tripped into a chair, and unlike normal it took a significant effort for him to pull himself back up. “No, no, no, no.” He shook his head once before wincing and putting a hand to it. “No.”

Natasha nodded. “Yeah. You and Steve and Bruce. Apparently you’re not as invincible as we thought.”

“Hey,” Bruce murmured, but he started coughing again and Tony pulled him into himself.

The world was collapsing in on Steve; everything was spinning and getting closer and farther away at the same time. The floor, the table, all of it, all of it was the wrong temperature, cold where it should be hot and vice versa… including his own skin, which felt like fire.

 _I have to get out of here_ , he thought distractedly, and he didn’t know where that thought came from, but once it was in his head, it refused to leave. He started toward the door, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate, and before he knew it, he was bracing himself against the countertop as everything fizzled gray.

Someone—Natasha?—was next to him now, saying a lot of things but only half of which were reaching his ears. Or were there more voices? There could be more, could be two, could be three, could be five...

“—eve?”

“—teve?”

“ _Steve!_ ”

Then Thor’s voice again, different from the others, and he managed to turn his head as the god of thunder let out a laugh that was rough and raspy.

“There’s nothing to be worried about, everyone! It is impossible for us to fall ill—we are stronger than the rest of you, we are different. We’re the Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, isn’t that what the director always says?”

Steve crashed to the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	7. Fortunately, I Am Mighty

As far as Tony Stark knew, he’d never developed a technology that allowed him to see in slow motion ( _although could you imagine the possibilities, maybe I should look into that_ ), but you could have fooled him the moment he saw Steve Rogers, the Captain of America himself, hit the floor.

He was standing too far away to do anything, and he was still supporting most of Bruce’s weight, but he still took a step forward when Steve started to wobble.

Natasha was the closest, but she had been distracted by Thor (hadn’t they all?) and even with her reflexes, she only managed to get to his side by the time he was already passed out. She knelt down and started to examine him—a brief, minimal, action that had been the training of an agent assessing damage in the field rather than a medical professional.

Tony shifted the arm that was around Bruce—who was looking more than halfway to unconsciousness himself and would probably have ended up next to Steve right now if Tony hadn’t been there—and made his way over. Times like this, it would have been very helpful to be at the Tower, where there was top-of-the-line equipment and seclusion from the rest of the world and an A.I. that could monitor them and give them information better than any S.H.I.E.L.D. drones—

 _All right. Enough of that._ Tony yanked his thoughts back on track with some difficulty; he hadn’t even been able to persuade Steve and Bruce that staying here in the depths of some base in who-the-fuck-knows of nowhere was the best idea, and both of them were a lot easier to sway than he was. Not to say they weren’t stubborn as all hell—stubbornness was practically a prerequisite for being an Avenger—but when it came down to it, Tony was the last person on Earth to be influenced by anyone else (to the aggravation of Rhodey, Nick Fury, the government as a whole, and most of the populated world, at his last count). Other than Pepper, of course. 

And if he was still second-guessing the decision to stay with S.H.I.E.L.D. instead of at the Tower… well, it probably meant that the paranoia from his own bout with the virus hadn’t entirely gone away, even if it had physically disappeared. It also meant that this was going to be a difficult next few days ( _please, don’t let this last more than that_ ).

But it wasn’t like he hadn’t already known that from the moment he saw the pale face of Steve Rogers lying on the floor.

All of these thoughts were still swirling around in his head two and a half hours later, after Natasha had lifted her head from the captain and said bluntly that they were calling Fury, after Clint had practically manhandled Thor back into his bunk (and even the fact that Clint was able to do that was a mark of how sick Thor really was), after Bruce had climbed back into his own bed and refused to move for the next twenty years, after calls and pacing and huddled meetings with Natasha and Clint, who were not either of them reassuring presences to huddle and meet with, after the knock on the door that all three of them tripped over each other to answer fast enough (although if anyone was tripping—never mind), after round after round of S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors in protective gear performing tests on their teammates to determine that _yes_ , they were infected with the virus too, _no_ , they hadn’t had any symptoms before today, _yes_ , they were sure and did they realize who they were talking to?

Tony let out a long breath and tapped his fingers on the glass he was leaning against. He’d been standing there for longer than his protesting muscles would like, but he wasn’t planning on moving, not until the doctors actually delivered on their promise of “yes, this is the last test, we’re almost done.”

Because, you know, there wasn’t anything at all interesting about having a super soldier, demigod, and part-time rage monster on your examination table. No sir. That was just a regular Thursday here at S.H.I.E.L.D., wasn’t it?

Natasha was stalking back and forth in front of him—had been for the last fifteen minutes or so—having finally managed to get ahold of Fury on a phone that would have to be disinfected later just in case, but the look in her eyes led Tony to assume that no one had hesitated one second before giving it to her. 

“No, I don’t understand why they weren’t tested before?” she was now saying. Her hands were still, one holding the phone to her ear and one against her side, but if she hadn’t been trained to disguise her emotions in cases like these, Tony was pretty sure she would’ve been fuming by now. “I thought that was the protocol—yes, I know this isn’t a normal case, but that shouldn’t be a valid excuse—”

Someone slid next to him, and Tony didn’t need to turn to see who it was. “Hey, Barton."

Clint gave a nod and settled himself back onto the glass wall, crossing his arms. As long as he was content to stay silent, Tony didn’t have a problem with that. There wasn’t anything anyone could say right now that wouldn’t be a straight out lie or a vague, greeting-card-type, reassurance. 

From his position he could barely make out the shapes of his friends from behind the crush of doctors and equipment and beeping machines that his mind unconsciously named and disassembled before fitting them back together. 

Steve was drifting in and out of unconsciousness, had been for the past hour or so, and kept mumbling and trying to sit up between coughs. His breathing sounded painful, small gasps completely at odds with the decently-sized presence, and his eyes—when he opened them—were clouded and hazy. If he knew where he was or what was happening, he gave no indication.

Bruce was the most awake of the three, but if any of them had thought that meant he’d be the most helpful, they were dead wrong. He absolutely refused to move or speak during the entire procedure, except for one moment when Tony had seen his temperature on one of the blinking screens and nearly had another heart attack—he’d whispered something like “Don’t worry, Tony, that’s jus’ the radiation—” before falling silent again. Even now, he lay there limply as another scanner moved down the length of his arm.

As for Thor, well… there had been some of what the S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors called “challenges” at first. Tony had asked them whether most “challenges” tended to put dents in monitors or rip out cords in one of multiple escape attempts, but the only one who bothered to answer him just said that they knew the thunder god had some reservations about Medical ( _no shit_ ). Now he was asleep, since that was the only way they could get him to hold still long enough to do their tests. A furrow was still apparent on his brow, and he twitched every so often, but they’d apparently found strong enough drugs to do the job.

“So how long did it take for you?” Tony asked abruptly. He was tired of being inside his own head.

Clint didn’t break his gaze at the opposite wall. Guy would make a good bouncer if the whole archery thing didn’t work out. “You already know; same as you.”

“And same as our favorite secret agent.” They both watched Natasha going off into the phone for a moment. “‘Cause it took way more time for any of us to be affected that much. The whole first few hours, sure we weren’t exactly up for running a 10k but we were coherent enough to tie our own shoes. Something’s different with them; they’re being hit harder than we were.”

“So, you’re saying they’re wimps?” A ghost of a grin whisked across Clint’s face before vanishing again.

Tony continued, ignoring him. “We assumed none of them would be affected by it, being—dare I say it—superhumans and one guy who’s something a little past even the word human, but that’s clearly not what happened, so scratch that. The super soldier serum had lots of effects other than great hair, but one of them was the manipulation of stem cell growth to increase muscle and bone mass and also affect the propagation of diseases… or at least the diseases we knew about, this one’s obviously different. It has a regeneration point—knew that already—so when tackled by an immune system like Cap’s, it must have adapted at a _really astonishing_ rate, triggering an immune response that would have to be working overtime in order to get…” He looked back up at Thor, Bruce, and Steve, still motionless in the testing area that had been the TV-watching area that morning. “That. You get that.”

He realized his hands were moving in the air like they wanted to be scrolling through holograms and shoved them in his pockets, turning back to Clint. “That’s my hypothesis for those two, anyway—” he pointed at Steve and Bruce “—you’re welcome to contribute on how you think Blondie’s biology works.”

Clint hadn’t blinked in the past three minutes. “Whatever you say, Stark.” 

Tony sighed. “I miss Bruce.”

“Then I’ve got good news for you.” Natasha appeared, the phone she’d been using evidently returned to its owner. 

“I love good news. Definitely better than the alternative.”

Natasha squeezed herself between Tony and Clint, bumping against the latter’s shoulder, and stretched out her feet to lean back against the wall. “They’re done with the tests now. Fury convinced them that this wouldn’t be the best chance to study every aspect of an enhanced body and instead focus on whether or not the virus is actually present. Strangely enough, they didn’t have much more to do in that area, so… they’re done."

The words _and who convinced Fury_ were on the tip of Tony’s tongue, but he had enough self-preservation to recognize when Natasha had just been subjected to a series of stressful phone calls, and so what came out of his mouth instead was, “Wow, already?”

“Quit being a smartass. I’m almost afraid they’ll take you seriously.” Natasha cast a glance over to the makeshift testing area, where it did indeed look like the S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors were packing up, some more regretfully than others. 

_This is exactly why Steve and Bruce hate Medical. And why I’m pretty sure once Thor spends enough time on Earth, he’ll feel the same._

“And not that I don’t want us to have as much information as possible,” Natasha continued. “But even I could tell it was getting redundant; the doctors need to focus and our teammates need to rest.”

“I think they’re ahead of you on that one,” Clint remarked. Tony followed his gaze to where the examination tables were being folded up and Steve, Bruce, and Thor were being slowly eased off of them. His fingers twitched at his sides as one of Steve’s arms fell free and knocked against the side of a monitor.

“Should we—” Natasha started, and Tony and Clint answered at the same time.

“Yeah.”

Without any further discussion, the three of them pushed themselves off the wall and headed over to the rest of the team.

* * *

The small glowing numbers on the tablet flicked from 2:59 to 3:00, and Tony rubbed his eyes to make sure he was reading it right. If he wasn’t, that would have been a problem, since he’d been looking over the data from the virus ever since the others had gone to sleep. 

The room was pitch dark except for Tony’s little halo of light, and silent except for the labored breathing coming from three of the six beds. They had done a sort of switcharound earlier, taking one look at the way Thor could barely walk, Bruce was shaking, and Steve was having trouble just keeping his eyes open, and decided that none of them were allowed on the top bunks. So now everybody was spread out and settled in, and the entire day had felt like some twisted repeat of the past couple weeks, only now he was on the opposite side and why didn’t anybody ever mention how that was worse? And so finally, once it was definitely late enough for the others to be actually sleeping and not faking it, once he’d lain awake on his new top bunk and traced the cracks in the ceiling into lines of code for as long as he could, he’d grabbed the tablet and started on his own personal quest for a cure. 

Spoiler alert: there wasn’t one. Every doctor and scientist S.H.I.E.L.D. could employ had basically said so, and even Bruce had been deliberately evasive whenever any of them had asked. It wasn’t surprising. This virus had come from another planet, another galaxy—who knew, maybe even another universe—and operated on rules that they didn’t even have the _language_ for yet.

But he was Tony freaking Stark, and he was going to _try his best_ , dammit. 

He scrolled a finger down the screen, trying to enlarge a diagram, but the numbers blurred in front of his tired eyes and he muttered something frustrated.

Almost immediately, there was a noise to his left, and he froze just as the shadowy shape of Natasha Romanoff appeared next to him on the bed. Her face was illuminated by the glow of the screen, and although she hid it better, Tony could tell she hadn’t done much sleeping that night either. 

“You know, I was just thinking that I was overdue for an assassination attempt,” he said, pushing the power button of the tablet and watching it go dark. “Kind of impressive I lasted this long.”

“It’d be a waste of time to assassinate you; you do enough reckless things on a daily basis,” Natasha countered, speaking quietly so as not to wake up the others. She settled in among his crumpled-up blanket, crossing her legs and leaning against his pillow. At least she could get comfortable.

“Ouch. But fair.” Tony ran a hand through his hair, which was starting to stand up on its own. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Yeah. I don’t think any of us have slept eight hours in about twenty years.”

“That’s harsh, I was unconscious for a while back in… when was it, July or August? When we were fighting those drones and the one kicked the suit through a building?”

“You get smacked into buildings all the time.”

“Well, that time was on the head.”

Natasha made a noncommittal noise. After a pause, she continued, still keeping her voice down. “It went away for us, remember. It looks bad at the beginning, but…” A slight shrug. “They’re tough enough to take a hit.”

“And that’s exactly the problem!” Tony didn’t mean for that to be so loud, but a rustle from the bunk below him had both him and Natasha going still. When nothing else happened, he continued in a quieter tone. “Their immune systems are too good; it’s working against them. Macromolecular synthesis was delayed and this fucking annoying virus had time to build up and now it’s just—” He threw up his hands before dropping them back down on top of his knees. 

“You know I don’t like this any more than you do,” Natasha said with surprising vehemence, and Tony looked at her just in time to see the protectiveness whisk across her face. “If all we had to do was point and shoot that would be one thing, but with this kind of enemy all we can do is wait.” 

“I’m tired of waiting,” Tony said abruptly. “Waiting’s not good enough this time. We need to find a cure.”

Natasha folded a corner of the blanket under the edge of the mattress. “Last time I checked, you didn’t exactly have an M.D.”

“I managed this okay, didn’t I?” Tony tapped the reactor in the center of his chest. It glowed a faint blue in the dark room.

* * *

The first thought that came to Tony’s head when he woke up was that he didn’t remember falling asleep. That in itself was not unusual—if he had a dime for every time that happened, he’d be a billionaire all over again—so the only thing that made it slightly worrying was that he had been woken up by the sound of someone laughing at him, and that was usually not a great way to start the day.

He stretched, his arms hitting the wall behind him. The light was on, but the room was quiet enough to make him think that it probably wasn’t too late in the morning. It would have been very nice to get under a blanket and go back to sleep, but just then the bed shifted, and he was suddenly aware that there was someone else waking up next to him.

Again, this would not have been unusual in different circumstances, but remembering that he was quarantined in a room with the Avengers was enough to make him sit up straight, nearly hitting his head on the ceiling.

Tony blinked and let his eyes adjust to the light. Clint was sitting lazily on the top bunk across from his, still laughing whenever he looked at him. When he noticed that Tony’s eyes were open, he grinned.

“I would ask how the two of you got in that position, but something tells me it’s better if I don’t know.”

“It’s too early for this, Barton—” Tony started, but then his leg bumped into something, and he turned to see Natasha rubbing her eyes from where she’d been curled up on a pillow. “Oh. Morning.”

“Morning.” Natasha said, pushing herself into a sitting position. It took her an annoyingly short amount of time to wake up. Honestly, the day they found out S.H.I.E.L.D. was secretly hiring androids would be his day of triumph. “Anyone else awake, Clint?”

Clint shook his head, then changed his mind and nodded. “Thor’s in the bathroom.”

From the closed door, there came the very obvious sound of someone throwing up.

“Ah.”

“Yep.”

Tony swung himself off the edge of the bed, landing on the floor. “How long have you been awake?” he asked. “And don’t say you never went to sleep, because I heard you snoring.”

Clint shrugged. “How d’you know that wasn’t Rogers?”

“Please. He’s the paragon of perfect humanliness,” Tony muttered, but it died in his throat when he actually saw the man in question.

Steve was still asleep, turned toward the wall and buried beneath a blanket, but Tony could still see the stiffness in the rise and fall of his chest as he took in shallow breaths, the faintest hint of a rasp audible in each one.

Tony carefully moved closer so that he was crouching down next to the bed. He felt Clint and Natasha behind him. He’d thought he was being quiet, but Steve made a noise from under the covers and rolled over to face him. Tony’s first instinct was to back up, but the super soldier’s eyes were still shut. There was a sheen of sweat over his forehead and all the color was gone from his skin.

“Don’t you guys have any kind of training for this stuff?” Tony asked, keeping his voice as low as he could. Even so, a furrow appeared between Steve’s brows. “What do you secret agents do when someone gets sick on a mission?”

Natasha and Clint made eye contact for a brief moment before Natasha shrugged. “Depends. If you’re not physically compromised, you go on for as long as you can. If it’s serious, you get an evac and your partner takes over. Most of our—” she gestured between herself and Clint “—training is for injuries. Bullet wounds, broken bones, and the like.”

“That’s helpful.”

“That’s S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Clint said. “Your best bet is just not to get sick at all; why do you think we’re all in such good condition?”

There was something wrong with that, something wrong with referring to yourself that way, as though you were a secondhand weapon with a few dents in the handle. “I don’t know, I kinda thought it had something to do with the spandex bodysuits.”

Steve coughed suddenly, and Tony wheeled his gaze back around toward him, sure he would wake up, but he just let his head sink back into the pillow (and if nothing else was an alarm bell, that sure was; Steve never slept with a pillow. He always seemed determined to be as uncomfortable as possible whenever he slept, to the point where Tony joked that he shouldn't have bothered putting a bed in his room in Avengers Tower if he would’ve been happier with a brick).

Before he could talk himself out of it, Tony reached a hand forward to hover over Steve’s forehead. “Shit,” he muttered. The doctors had given them fever medicine yesterday, but it had clearly already burned through his system. How he could sleep through it was beyond Tony, although the darkness under his eyes was a decent clue.

“Think I’ll get him a glass of water for when he wakes up,” Clint said in an undertone. Tony nodded without really hearing him, and faint footsteps creaked away across the floor behind him as Clint headed to the sink.

He realized he was still holding his hand to Steve’s forehead and moved it away. “Is it okay for him to have the blanket, do you think? He’s… really warm.”

Natasha leaned forward to feel the end of the blanket. “These blankets are a tenth of an inch away from being sheets, I think he’ll be fine. Until he wakes up from you staring at him, anyway.”

“Right.” Tony stood up and backed off. There was just something _off_ about seeing Steve like this. About seeing any of them like this, at the mercy of some virus from outer space. He’d gotten used to the trips to S.H.I.E.L.D. Medical after missions by this point—a piece of scrap metal stabbing through his armor, Clint with a dislocated shoulder and glowering at the world about it, Natasha bleeding from a head injury that she insisted looked worse than it actually was, Steve limping on a leg that had gotten crushed beneath a collapsing pile of rubble, Bruce passed out on any vaguely horizontal surface (teammates qualified), Thor trying to brush off a concussion that was more obvious than he thought it was—but all of those were expected. Hazards of the trade. That could be patched up within the hour and given a neat timetable for recovery.

This was… not. And the moment Tony was done making sure the group was okay, it was straight to the drawing board for him to keep working on that cure.

Noise and movement from the other side of the room caught his attention and he turned around to see Bruce shoving the blanket off of his bed and trying to push himself to his feet.

_Drawing board might have to wait._

“Hey, there,” Tony said, crossing over to Bruce’s bed. “I’m glad you’re ready to rise and shine and all, but maybe hold off on the rising for now.”

Bruce followed the sound of Tony’s voice and immediately closed his eyes. His hands were bracing himself on the edge of the bed. “What?"

“This bed,” Tony continued, gesturing to it just before he sat down. “I suggest you stay in it. Although, what the hell, I’m not the doctor here, maybe your expert advice would be to face-plant onto this very unattractive and carpet-less floor.”

Bruce gave a kind of groan and opened his eyes again. They were bloodshot and heavily underlined with shadows. Tony had a moment to wonder if Bruce was really fully awake yet before he drew his arms into himself and asked, “Are the tests over?”

Tony winced at the hoarseness of his voice. “Yeah. They finished yesterday. You three are definitely members of Team Space Virus.”

“Hmm.” Bruce continued his nervous self-exam, which seemed to consist of making sure his limbs were still attached to his body, when he ran a hand up his bare arm and froze.

Tony figured he had a pretty good idea of what the problem was. “Don’t worry, big guy, that mark is just from the blood pressure cuff; I promise I didn’t let them take any blood.” He scooted an inch closer to Bruce on the bed, who instantly shifted away. “They did get a little grouchy after that, since, you know, they couldn’t do a blood test, but there’s other ways of diagnosing a virus and I convinced them that the potential for radiation poisoning _reeeeally_ wasn’t worth it.” He grinned. “Honestly, one of these days.”

“I wouldn’t say radiation poisoning would be in my top ten reasons for not letting S.H.I.E.L.D. get ahold of my blood, but okay.” Bruce was visibly calming down, now only rubbing at his hands instead of up and down his arms.

“Come on, we like them sometimes. Maybe top twenty.”

“I’m not as nice as you, I guess.” Bruce offered him a smile that was distinctly weaker than normal. He started to push himself off the bed again. “I think I’m gonna go and keep working on—” As soon as he was on his feet, he went pale and Tony rolled his eyes before guiding him back down.

“You’re gonna go and keep lying down? Because I agree wholeheartedly.” He let go of Bruce now that he was back on the bed, but still didn’t take his eyes off him.

Bruce gave up and let himself drop against the pillow, staring up at the underside of the top bunk. “I wish you could hear yourself right now.” He coughed into his elbow. “I should—should record you saying these words and have JARVIS play them back.”

“There is a saying that I feel applies to this situation, has something to do with those who can’t do, teaching—you know the one, right?” Tony gestured vaguely in the air. “But anyway, don’t you think this is fun? It’s like we’ve switched roles; you get to be stubborn and masochistic and… huh, that’s actually not too different from normal. Maybe we’re more alike than we think, Big Green.”

“I think that’s gotta be the laziest nickname you’ve ever come up with,” Bruce said. “And it’s still different; you were way worse when you were sick than I am—” A series of coughs prevented him from finishing.

Tony waited, raising an eyebrow pointedly. “Wow. You’re not even giving me a _chance_ to form my own counterargument. How very rude of you, Banner.”

“Tony _._ ” Bruce caught his breath and tried to level Tony with a look, but he just wasn’t as good at it as his larger, greener, alter ego; and that went double for when he was clearly having trouble just staying conscious for the conversation.

“Bruce.”

They were interrupted when the bathroom door behind them was flung open and Thor emerged, sagging into the doorframe. His long hair hung in sweaty strands around his face and he stared hazily at various points all around the room before focusing in on his teammates.

“Ah.” He nodded. “Right. All of you are here.” He tried to step forward, but stumbled and grabbed onto the edge of the door, which was not exactly meant for that purpose.

Clint stood from where he had been talking quietly with Natasha in front of Steve’s bed and hurried over to Thor as quickly as he could, sliding the thunder god’s arm around his shoulder. “Alright, this isn’t a good place to be; let’s get you to one.” He tried a step, but Thor was leaning almost entirely on him now without seeming to realize what he was doing. “Okay, yeah. Nat, d’you mind…? A hand…?”

“No problem.” Natasha dashed over and moved Thor’s other arm from where it still death-gripped the doorframe to her own shoulders. “I’m guessing you’re at the dizziness stage? That was a pain in the ass.”

“I assume so.” Thor made an effort toward walking on his own, but Clint murmured something in his ear that was along the lines of “it’s all good; we’ve got you, dude” from what Tony could pick up. He bore a few more seconds of Natasha and Clint supporting him over to his bed before speaking again. “I apologize for this inconvenience—” A cough tore its way from his throat, interrupting him.

“Quit that,” Natasha said. The combined effort of her and Clint had gotten Thor to the bed, where he sat down heavily on the bottom bunk, letting his head drop into his hands in a motion that was very uncharacteristic for him. Tony remembered the dull, persistent headaches from when he had the virus and sympathized. “You’d think this would be the thing that got all of you to stop wanting to hear yourselves talk for five minutes, but I guess not.”

“To be fair, who doesn’t like hearing him talk?” Tony pointed out. “He’s only been at the Tower for five months and already I feel like I never need to watch a Viking movie again.”

Thor groaned and curled sideways on the bed. “Did the director say that Lady Sif retrieved the creature that caused this?”

Natasha nodded.

“Damn.” Thor spoke into the pillow, his voice rasping. “Because I would love nothing more than to hurl it into the fiery pits of Muspelheim myself.”

“Took the words right out of my mouth,” Clint said dryly as he leaned against the wall. “So, you want some ginger ale or anything?”

Natasha snorted. “Yeah, Fury would love it if we called him up with a grocery list.”

“Well, screw him, he’s the one who didn’t authorize for all of us to get tested in the first place.” Tony half-stood up from the bed to peer over the sheet that Thor was now pulling over his head. “Oh, are we being too loud?”

“That’s not new,” came Thor’s grumble from under the sheet.

“Well, all you had to do was say something.” Tony shot Clint a look, and he flicked off the light switch nearest to the beds, plunging them into darkness and leaving the half of the room with the couch and the food area still lit.

He heard a noise next to him and looked down at Bruce, whose eyes had slipped shut and was breathing in a slow, even, rhythm. “Looks like two out of three are down for the count,” he said, quietly enough not to wake Bruce but loud enough for it to carry to Natasha and Clint.

“Three out of three,” Natasha corrected with a slight smirk.

“What do you mean three out of—” Tony followed her gaze to Thor’s bed, where the demigod had somehow passed out cold in the three seconds since he’d looked away. He let out a low whistle. “Damn. Now _that’s_ the superpower I want.”

A thoughtful expression fell over Clint’s face. “Speaking of, do you think he’d notice if I gave lifting the hammer a try while he’s asleep?”

All three of them involuntarily turned toward the dresser, where Mjolnir had been resting like some overly dedicated paperweight since Tuesday.

“Wouldn’t risk it,” Tony finally decided.

Bruce twitched a little and gave a small sigh in his sleep, part of the blanket sliding off his shoulder. Before he even realized what he was doing, Tony was tucking it back in, slowly and gently so that Bruce didn’t wake up. _Really never gonna hear the end of it now_ , he thought, but then he glanced around.

Clint had retrieved his promised glass of water from the sink and was setting it down next to Steve’s bunk so that it would be within easy reach when he woke up. As the super soldier twisted around in his sleep again, Clint settled himself against the wall to keep watch like it was just another mission from S.H.I.E.L.D.

Natasha had scooped up the empty trash can from where it had been rolling around by the couch and placed it on the floor under Thor’s head, giving absolutely no indication that the whole thing was kinda gross. Tony supposed she’d seen far, far worse anyway. When Thor coughed again, she leaned over and tilted the pillow to a better angle before climbing up to her own bunk.

_You know… if I had to get quarantined with any group of people in the world, these guys aren’t half bad._

_Except, if I was given the choice and everything, I would definitely want Rhodey and Pepper, but that would mean they’d get sick too… stupid human immune systems._

_How about the bots?_ He had already been considering finding a way to upload JARVIS into the S.H.I.E.L.D. systems—more than he already was, that is—and he was even starting to miss DUM-E, although it would be a miracle if nobody stepped on him with such close proximity…

_You know what? This team is good._

_And I have to make sure it stays that way._

Tony got up from the bed. It was time to find a cure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	8. Out of Your Fingers, Was That, Like, Sparkles?

Something thunked down next to Tony’s head, almost clipping his ear. He couldn’t bring himself to do more than lift his head to see where it had come from.

“It’s six-thirty.” Natasha’s voice. He turned his head farther, feeling a pop in his neck as he moved from the hunched-over position he’d been in for clearly longer than he’d thought.

“What?”

“Six-thirty. P.M. Eastern Standard Time. In case you wanted to eat or blink or something.” Natasha shrugged. Her hair was wet from the shower, hanging in dark red curls around her face and leaving drips on her S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue shirt. He was wearing one too, actually—laundry was hard when there wasn’t a machine in the room with them (kinda spoke to how long said room was actually designed to hold people for) and everything had to go through extreme power disinfecting before it passed through the door.

Tony blinked at her to prove a point, only to be assaulted by a sharp sting to the eyeballs. Rubbing them would give her too much satisfaction, though. He kept his hands on the table and ignored the water gathering in his eyes. “Did dinner get delivered already?”

“Not yet. That’s lunch.’ Natasha nodded to the something she’d dropped next to Tony’s head, which was apparently a wrapped-up sandwich. The workings of his brain finally caught up to his stomach and he snagged it, pulling off the wrapping.

“I would ask if you poisoned it, but does it even matter?” he asked, taking a bite. He wasn’t even aware of the flavor; his brain was still firmly stuck in science mode and could only register bread-meat-vegetable at this point. 

“That’s the spirit.” Natasha pulled out the chair across from him and sat, reaching out for the tablet he’d dropped in favor of the sandwich and spinning it around so she could study it. After a moment, she spun it back. “Should I assume that this is all the jargon equivalent of sunshine and rainbows?”

“Mmph.” Tony swallowed the next bite of sandwich. “Oh yeah. I definitely missed my calling. Next up is osteoporosis and the common cold.”

“Well, that’s good. Wouldn’t want you to wash up at forty-two.”

“I swear this virus is laughing at us,” Tony said abruptly, because  _ damn it  _ if he hadn’t been staring at this screen so long his eyes were bleaching as bright as Steve’s and if every medical professional S.H.I.E.L.D. could hire hadn’t been working on this for longer, and  _ it hadn’t made any difference.  _ Because this disease wasn’t normal science, it couldn’t be warped to fit their definitions of biology and physics any more than Thor’s hammer could, and it refused to let them even try to wrap their heads around how it  _ did  _ work, not without weeks spent testing and experimenting and theorizing and still they had barely cracked the capsid. “I was just reading over this update from that biochemist who was working on it before, from the research division? Their name is either Fitz or Simmons and it’s really messing with me because all of their data is coming from the same account—but  _ that  _ doesn’t even matter because sure they managed to isolate one compound after all this time but turns out! They all function independently of each other so any cure we make would need flexible components and—” He realized his fingers were drumming a frantic rhythm on the tablet screen and forced them to lie flat. “I’m not an epidemiologist, Nat. You wanna know what I accomplished today? I uploaded JARVIS to the tablet. Say hi, J.”

On cue, the A.I.’s voice sounded from the tiny speaker in the side of the tablet. “Hello, Miss Romanoff.”

Natasha’s eyes widened marginally, but her only other reaction was to say, “Hey. There’s a voice we haven’t heard in a while.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Tony said quickly, raising a finger. “He does speed up the process  _ immensely _ , but this definitely-inferior-to-StarkTech-I-told-you-so thing—” He tapped the tablet screen again. “—isn’t exactly the suit or even the labs and I’m honestly afraid it’s gonna crash any second with him on here… which is hilarious, isn’t it?”

“Sounds like you need help of the non-robot variety.” 

“J isn’t a robot, he’s an artificial intelli—wait, are you volunteering?”

Natasha tilted her head. “Unless you see anyone else around here who is both conscious and can use a device made past the year 1950, I guess so.” They both glanced over at the couch, where Tony truly couldn’t tell if Clint was awake or asleep, sitting like a stone statue with his unmoving eyes (open or closed, Tony also couldn’t tell, but it also didn’t matter since he’d seen the archer asleep both ways) fixed on the muted TV screen. “Plus I did find this.”

She disappeared to the couch for a moment, where she shoved Clint’s leg over to poke around in between the cushions, and came back with the other S.H.I.E.L.D. tablet. The tablet that hadn’t been seen in days thanks to Thor and Clint’s… actually, he didn’t have a clue  _ what  _ they were doing that could possibly result in a gaping hole in the bathroom vents. “I realized I had a lot of time on my hands."

“I’ll keep that in mind next time Bruce loses his glasses somewhere in the Tower.” Tony leaned back and met Natasha’s gaze. “But how are you at manually sorting through the most annoying chunks of documentation known to man or alien to pick out the useful shit and rephrase it into vaguely polite-sounding requests with no guarantee that it will actually achieve anything?”

Natasha pressed her tablet on and started swiping through screens. “I worked as your assistant, remember?”

And so they got to business.

It was… an amount of hours later when both Tony and Natasha decided to call it for the night. No new data was coming in as most of the doctors were off shift—and those who weren’t had sent a deliberately worded email explaining that the remaining patients needed to recover and did not need to be bothered in the middle of the night for fresh samples to test—and JARVIS had been interrupting his steady flow of information with reminders about what time it was and how many hours of sleep each of them had gotten the previous night. 

They both stood up, a slower process than usual, and headed over to the sleeping area (which they had labeled as such for similar reasons as why the food area was called that and not a dining room), where the other three were still asleep in their bunks at slightly different angles than that morning. Tony wasn’t sure if that meant they had never woken up or if they had natural sleeping positions, but he also figured that the entire room could have lifted off the ground and transported them to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and he probably wouldn’t have noticed.

Natasha drifted off toward the bathroom, leaving Tony staring up at the top bunk of his bed and wondering whether it was  _ really  _ worth it to drag himself up there instead of just collapsing here on the floor.

He had resigned himself to grabbing one of the lower ladder rungs when there was movement behind him and he spun around to face Clint Barton, who somehow still managed to look all creepy and spy-like when half of his hair was smushed against the side of his head from sleeping on it.

“That’s it,” Tony muttered through a yawn. “We’re getting you a bell too.”

Clint looked unimpressed. “How’d the progress go today? Any closer to a cure?”

“Well,” Tony said. “We’ve targeted a composite that could theoretically—”

Clint held up his hands to stop him. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re dealing with the point-and-shoot guy, remember? I’m good with either a thumbs up or a thumbs down.”

Tony met his eyes and slowly rotated both of his hands so that his thumbs were facing sideways.

Clint nodded. “Cool.”

“At least I can make someone happy,” Tony said under his breath. Well, everything they were saying was under their breath, since the green bean was asleep two feet away from them and waking up any of the team would not be a great idea, but this was even  _ further  _ under his breath, entering the range of only-StarkTech-designed-hearing-aids-can-pick-it-up-now territory. 

He had been honest with the thumbs-sideways; even after an entire day of working and researching and reading over the results from the scientists who were  _ actually  _ allowed materials and enlarging diagrams until they were nothing but pixels, it still had only pushed them the slightest tiny step forward.

_ This is why I hate working in biochem. With engineering, it’s as easy as “you want to build a robot? Or a sentient toaster? Or a life-size suit of armor with flight and weapons capabilities? There. Built. Done. Look what you have unleashed upon the world.” There aren’t any unknown variables, any pulling samples from human beings when you need to see if stuff works the way you want it to, any holding your breath as you wait for the whims of nature to do whatever the fuck they want. _

_ And the stakes are much, much, lower.  _

Even that tiny step would have been less without Natasha’s apparent technological prowess, which had thrown him for kind of a loop. Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised—it had only been a few weeks before this whole incident that she’d hacked the Tower’s security system to reject Steve’s passcode for eighteen hours as a “training exercise”—but he definitely hadn’t given her enough credit before.

Although that state of complete and utter determination that she had entered earlier—when her fingers had been flying across the touchscreen and the look in her eyes made him remember why people feared the Black Widow—helped.

Like thought had summoned her, Natasha emerged, as silent as a shadow as she joined the other two by the beds. Her eyes darted around like she was doing a headcount of their teammates, and Tony couldn’t help but follow her gaze.

Bruce was the first one he noticed, since Tony was standing right next to his bunk. The scientist was wrapped around a pillow, his eyelids fluttering every so often like he was just barely on the edge of waking up, and his breathing slow and measured in a way that reminded Tony of the times he’d be close to a transformation. That wasn’t the danger here—as evidenced by when a deeper breath caught by accident, ripping a cough from his throat—but Tony still lingered on him for a moment before turning to the next bed.

Across the room was where Steve lay, flat on his back with his arms at his sides as though glued there. Tony recognized the position from whenever he and Rhodey would have sleepovers (and yes, he would continue to call them sleepovers until the day he died no matter  _ how  _ many times Rhodey made a snide comment about it) and knew it was a military thing, but that didn’t stop him from wanting to go over there and fold him in blankets until he was  _ forced  _ to relax. He actually might’ve, if his brain hadn’t decided to remind him that this was Captain America and that his reaction when he woke up, as hilarious as it might be, would not necessarily be good for his carefully established rivalry. 

_ Blankets might not be the best idea anyway _ , he amended to himself after seeing the sweat on Steve’s forehead and his general look of discomfort that told him all he needed to know about whether his fever had broken or not.

Thor’s bed was against the far wall, and its occupant did not seem capable of staying still, even in his sleep. Every few seconds, it seemed, Thor was tossing and turning one way or the other, probably getting  _ ridiculously  _ tangled up in the sheets. When he looked closer, he could see the twisted look on Thor’s face as his mouth formed silent words and coughed in his sleep. Even though he was buried under almost every blanket they had in the room, the Norse god was shivering.

Natasha was the first one to break the silence. “Their low point… it’s coming sooner than we think, isn’t it?” Her voice was quiet but not whispering.

_ I guess she picked up on some of all that medical jargon, huh.  _ “Yeah.”

“Why? Because they’re… them? Doesn’t that mean that the whole disease will pass through their systems faster?” Clint was leaning forward slightly, a curious amount of investment on his face that seemed strange at first—and then Tony noted how Steve, Bruce, and Thor were all carefully tucked under their blankets, how their dirty and sweat-covered clothes from the previous day were folded in front of the door for whenever S.H.I.E.L.D. decided to send someone, how the sink was empty but the counter was lined with drying dishes and water glasses, and he remembered that Clint had kids. 

God, that still messed with him sometimes.

“Not exactly,” he answered. “It might seem that way, since they’re getting so much—” he swallowed, remembering the clinical way the reports had listed his teammates’ symptoms, how his eyes had widened with each progressive item because those numbers for a regular person would mean  _ very bad things _ “—worse than we were, quicker than we were, but that’s not because they’re actually healing faster. It’s just their insane immune systems working overtime to  _ try  _ to heal them faster and realizing they can’t, not without… well, we don’t know yet. All we know is that when they exhibit the stages of this virus, it’s going to look worse than it did for us.”

“Well, how much worse?” Clint asked.

Tony didn’t answer.

* * *

Later that night, Tony jolted awake to a shout of pain.

He didn’t register who it was, what it was, where it was coming from, any of that—his eyes were still half-open and his mind stuck in sleep, but that shout, that  _ cry _ … it had him twisting out of his sheets and practically falling out of bed.

His feet smacked against the floor and he rubbed his eyes frantically, staring in every direction to find the source. Dazedly, he spotted Clint and Natasha, also shaken from sleep (if either of them ever slept; data was still inconclusive) and looking around sharply as though tensing for a fight.

It didn’t take long to figure out the source of the shout; Thor was shaking in his bed, the blankets strewn all around him in a crater and desperate sounds coming from his mouth that were not all all congruous with his previous image of his teammate.

Tony approached warily as Clint swung himself over the edge of the top bunk to drop next to Thor’s head and Natasha crouched down on the floor

“Thor?” she asked.

There was no response except for a pained groan, and he disappeared again beneath the single remaining sheet, which was twisting so hard in his fist that it was only a matter of time before it ripped.

“Is he—” Tony started as he stepped closer. The demigod rolled over so that his head was facing him and he could confirm what he already thought. “Yeah, he’s asleep. Um. What should we do?”

“He’s  _ burning  _ up,” Natasha murmured, letting her hand fall back down to her side. “I don’t even know if—Thor?  _ Thor _ . You need to wake up.” When nothing happened, she shook her head. “I don’t know if I could make it worse if I—if he doesn’t recognize us and we try to wake him up, his first instinct might be—” She trailed off, but Tony was pretty sure he and Clint got what she meant; no, bruises shaped like Asgardian fingerprints were  _ not  _ this year’s style. 

Thor took in a deep, ragged breath—which rapidly turned to violent coughing as he shivered and struggled for air.

Tony felt rooted to the spot, wanting to help, to be able to do something, but his usual quick thinking seemed to have abandoned him and when his mouth opened, nothing came out. Natasha seemed similarly frozen.

For whatever reason, Clint was the first one to snap into action. “S.H.I.E.L.D. or medicine cabinet?” he asked roughly.

“What?” Finally, Tony could form a word, but it was not a very helpful one.

“I’m going to one or the other, which do we need?”

“S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Natasha answered at the same time Tony said, “Medicine cabinet.” They shared a quick glance of as much exasperation they could muster under the circumstances before Clint threw up his hands and bolted around the corner. A few seconds later, they could hear a cabinet door bang open and the sound of every box and bottle on the shelf being rifled through with chilling systematicness given how quickly he was doing it. 

Thor was muttering in his sleep now, forcing the words out between coughs and gasps, his low voice made lower with its hoarseness. “Step away, step— _ away _ —this is not what was meant to happen, you are not—I do not want to— _ away _ —”

“Yeah, he’s definitely at the hallucinating stage,” Natasha whispered. “I don’t know what he’s talking about—where he is—but there’s probably thousands of years to choose from. That’ll make this fun.”

“You mean you don’t have every file on our lives memor—” Tony started, but then he froze. “Natasha.”

He didn’t need to say more—her eyes were better, more skilled at noticing things—and this was a pretty big thing to notice. Both of them took a slow step back, keeping their eyes on Thor.

Or more specifically, at his hands, where tiny sparks of lightning were beginning to jump between his fingers.

Clint reappeared, clutching something in one hand, and stopped short. “Oh. Oh,  _ shit _ .”

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

“Back up, back up, definitely back up—” Tony’s back hit the corner of the couch. Natasha’s head snapped toward him.

And that’s when the storm hit.

Thor’s head pressed back into the pillow, his eyes still shut but with burning light shining from behind his lids. Lightning arced and split and zagged from his hands to his head to his legs, racing and zapping all along his body. Burn marks sliced into the wall and the bed around him, leaving black scars.

Over on the dresser, his hammer seemed to glow with a newfound shine—attracting the lightning like each strike was drawn to it—and Tony felt the air humming and popping. A little thrill shivered its way down his spine that could have been adrenaline or electricity.

Thor cried out again, and the lightning responded; cracking and shooting faster and faster, reaching farther and farther until the whole room seemed dazzled. A tendril snapped near his chest, and he felt an odd jolt from the arc reactor.

Natasha noticed—of course she did—and before Tony could say anything, he was being shoved over the back of the couch, landing half-on and half-off as his head smacked against the armrest. 

Distantly, he heard the tail end of Clint yelling something: “—maybe get the guy with the heart problems out of here?”

“Already on it!” Natasha called back, and there really wasn’t a reason to yell, was there—they were all barely a few steps away from each other—but something about the situation of  _ being surrounded by literal (magical?) lightning _ tended to make a person excited. “Maybe get the guy who turns into the Hulk out of here!”

Another loud clap of thunder as Thor strained against whatever fever-imagined enemy he was fighting. Tony pulled himself up so that his head was over the edge of the couch. The single ceiling light that had been left on flickered once, twice.

Clint was putting his no-doubt-full-of-snark reply on hold to stare up at it with trepidation. “I swear, if the power goes out—”

The light flickered again, and then the room plunged into darkness.

For a moment, there was no sound. The lightning seemed to have been put on pause—Tony couldn’t see Thor well enough in the dark to tell if there would be a part two. The room was entirely silent except for ragged breathing, until the shadowy shape that was Clint cursed and looked down at the floor.

“Aw, power, no.”

“Well, we’re also alive,” Tony pointed out. He looked from Clint to Natasha. “Right? We’re all alive? I know I’m alive, because I want to find out how Hammer Time’s body withstands that much electrostatic discharge—”

“That can be first priority after we find out if he’s going to become a human light show again,” Natasha interrupted. “And how long we’re going to be in the dark.”

“That’s why you all keep me around.” Tony tapped the arc reactor, whose blue glow was the only remaining source of light in the room. Other than the tablets lying out on the table, which were lighting up like crazy with notifications (they’d made a good call to put them on mute) that were definitely from S.H.I.E.L.D. and so definitely could be later’s problem. “That and I don’t make you pay rent.”

Natasha didn’t respond, climbing back over the couch and making her way cautiously toward Thor, her training evident in each quiet movement. When Tony started to follow her, she muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “you stay put.”

Which was one of the funniest things ever said to him. Tony followed Natasha over to Thor’s bed again, joined shortly after by a wary Clint. Both the master assassins were on edge, Tony noted, and while he agreed that yes, what just happened had been incredibly dangerous and  _ literally  _ of mythic proportions, there was also a part of him that kind of wanted to see another round.

Maybe Rhodey had a point about him sometimes.

“I’m getting deja vu,” Natasha said under her breath as she approached Thor’s still form, which was twisted up in half-ruined sheets and paler than a Capsicle fresh out of the ice. An occasional shudder still ran through his body, but on the whole, he was a lot calmer than before. 

Apparently all it had taken was enough time to get it out of his system, which would’ve been great if that had happened  _ before  _ the power went out. 

Thor appeared to be asleep again, but his mouth was moving, faint sounds that Tony had to lean closer to make out.

“—the best on Asgard, I assure you, I’ll prove it to you if you don’t believe me, just wait, I shall—”

Tony pulled back, unable to stop the smile that quirked onto his face. Natasha and Clint were better at it, but he could still see the sparks of amusement in their eyes (ooh, don’t think about sparks).

“Sounds like Blondie’s having sweet dreams,” Tony said, standing up. “And as long as he plans to stay that way, I think we—” He froze, midway through turning around, the smile dropping off his face. “Oh.”

Apparently, Thor wasn’t the only one taking a hit from the virus right now—and the thunder and lightning and sudden darkness wasn’t exactly a huge help to fever-delirious minds.

Tony was moving before he knew he was moving, torn in two directions for a moment before dimly registering both Natasha and Clint going the same way—and he was never one to follow the crowd—so his feet led him to the edge of Steve’s bed.

Steve was awake, and the realization had to thud around in his mind for a moment before anything else. Steve was  _ awake. _

Awake, and coughing so hard that it was a miracle he could breathe at all. He was struggling to sit up, his hands clenching against the sheets in bursts of his usual strength before he dissolved into another desperate gasp for air.

“Rogers—” Tony cut himself off. “Steve. Are you—never mind, I can see that, shouldn’t waste time on that—do you know where you are? Do you know me?” He peered into those blue-spacious-sky eyes but was met with only a glazed panic.

“Cold—” Steve managed to choke out. “It’s so—I’m so cold—” He  _ was  _ shivering, Tony noticed, even as he could feel the heat of his skin without even touching. Tony made a silent promise to himself to hold off on the Capsicle jokes for at least a day after this and reached out to pull the blanket over Steve’s shoulders.

“There you go, Cap, all nice and bundled up—and as soon as Birdbrain gets his ass over here we can check your temperature again—”

“It’s  _ cold _ ,” Steve repeated, and his coughing seemed to subside, leaving him to curl on his side. His blond hair was a mess, all sticked to his forehead in wisps. “I’m so cold… I know you said it was cold and I didn’t listen, I’m sorry…”

Tony paused with his hand hovering in the air over Steve’s blanketed shoulder. “What are you talking about?”

Steve gulped a breath of air, still shivering. “It’s cold—Bucky, I’m sorry, I had your jacket but I left it out on the porch… it’s  _ cold _ , Buck…”

And there went any hope that the captain had any idea where they were. Or what time period it was, evidently.  _ Damn _ . He’d really been hoping to at least have that.

_ What am I even supposed to do? _ There had to be something, something he’d heard and half-forgotten from one of those health and safety guides Pepper loved to send around, or something Rhodey had told him from his own training, or even a damn Wikihow article at this point—he’d take it.

But his mouth started talking before his brain could catch up with any of that. “I know you feel cold, Steve, but you’ve actually got a fever—there’s probably something I should be doing about that but I think Barton just raided the medicine cabinet—maybe if you sit up your breathing will be easier, it sounds terrible right now if you don’t mind my saying—”

Steve’s head whipped around to fix Tony with a dark look. “Shut the fuck up, Howard, we’ve still got six minutes until roll call.” He buried his face in the pillow again and went silent.

Tony felt like he had been punched in the gut. He reeled backwards, and all of a sudden there were hands on his shoulders, and Clint was talking to him as he guided him away from the bed.

“All right, clearly the captain’s got his head in the clouds—why don’t you go deal with Banner, I’ll handle this.”

“Bruce?” Tony asked. “What’s going on with—oh.” He stumbled away from Steve, running a hand over his face absentmindedly as he was half-shoved toward Bruce’s bunk. Maybe that was Barton’s real superpower—telekinetic glaring. That would make the “Hawkeye” name make more sense than for a guy with a bow and arrow, at least.

With one last glance over his shoulder at Steve, who was mumbling something else to Clint, Tony spun toward the only other occupied bed—and quite possibly the one that he should’ve checked first.

Bruce was awake too, although it took a couple seconds to make sure, as he was curled up into the smallest ball imaginable, his face hidden beneath the arms that wrapped around himself. Unlike Steve and Thor, he wasn’t speaking, whether to them or to whatever imagined visions the fever was creating. He was coughing a little, but he seemed to be trying to stifle the sound, and his entire body was wracked with shivers.

Tony settled down to kneel next to Natasha. “Any sign of green?”

“A little,” Natasha replied, and he heard the slight tremor in her voice despite her obvious attempts to keep it even. “Not enough to—you know—I don’t think.“ There was an unspoken “yet” that neither of them acknowledged.

“You don’t have to be here, you know,” Tony reminded her quietly. “He won’t get jealous if you focus your gentle and comforting nature on Spangles instead.”

“Because you know exactly how to handle this on your own.” There was no venom to the retort, however, and both of them sat in silence for a moment.

Tony decided he didn’t like silence. Especially not when said silence meant that his teammate was sick and he was as of current doing zip zero nada about it. Helplessness was now being bumped up to the top of his least favorite feelings list. 

“Hey, Brucie. Big guy. Jolly Green. Which one do you like better, anyway? Doesn’t matter, I can rotate.” He shifted so that he was closer to the side of the bed, his knee practically scraping the edge. “I’m clocked out of Cap-watching duty, so now I’m all yours. Not that you were my second choice, but you’ve gotta admit how Rogers can give you that sad little nineteen-forties orphan-type look, like we  _ get it _ , you grew up in the Great Depression, you don’t have to remind us every second.” He waited for Bruce’s reaction, but he only curled tighter in on himself in a way that  _ had  _ to be uncomfortable.

Tony felt Natasha shifting next to him, but she didn’t move away—even though they both knew how easy it would be for her to do so without him even noticing. He kind of liked her a little more for that. 

“Well, enough about him,” Tony continued, his eyes fixed on the small piece of Bruce’s face that was visible beneath the crook of his arms. “That’s ancient history—hey, you see what I did there?” Still nothing. He was beginning to wonder if Bruce could even hear him. “Okay, you’re right; that wasn’t one of my best. Sparky did just wake us all up in the middle of the night, though, so maybe cut me some slack.” He let out a long breath. “So, hey, how about you? I know you’re probably feeling—”

He reached out a hand to gently touch Bruce’s shoulder—to see how warm it was, to try to calm the shaking, he wasn’t even sure—and Bruce jerked away, his eyes flying open.

“Don’t,” he gasped with a voice that was weak and raspy. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but a huge shudder ran through his body and he coughed again, wrapping his arms even tighter around himself.

Tony leaned back immediately, holding up his hands. “Hey, no, it’s okay. I’m sorry about that, we will make a note, not doing that again.” He peered closer. “Guessing we can check ‘yes’ on the hallucinating thing, though, right?”

“Right,” Natasha said. 

“You sound… hmm. You sound certain.”

“Well, yeah. Didn’t you see his eyes?”

“Green?”

“No. Okay, a little, but you know what I mean—and you need to stop getting so excited about that, by the way.”

Tony let his hands drop back down to rest on top of his crossed legs. “Not my fault nobody else sees the sheer scientific awesomeness of a person who breaks the law of conservation of mass, I mean, come on.”

“I’d rather not see it when we’re in a space as small and enclosed as this.” Natasha met his gaze with raised eyebrows. “Anyway, what I meant was that his eyes looked like Steve’s and Thor’s: unfocused, almost glazed over—like they’re not really home at the moment.”

“Ah.” Tony hadn’t gotten much of a chance to see for himself, but then again, that was why they had super spies on the team. “And what can we do about that?”

Natasha glanced over at the table, where the tablets were still lighting up like crazy. “I assume you’re looking for an answer other than ‘answer S.H.I.E.L.D.’s calls?’”

“Obviously. Yuck.”

A smile darted across her face. “Well—”

She was interrupted by a loud thud, and both of them whipped around to see the shadowy form of Steve fallen off of his bunk, twisted hopelessly in the sheets with a dazed expression. Clint was standing next to him with his arms extended like he’d made a halfhearted attempt to catch him. When he caught Tony and Natasha staring at him, he shrugged like “hey, I tried.”

Steve was coughing again, but now they were turning more into retches. He kicked the sheets off of his legs and struggled to his feet, a hand over his mouth.

Clint’s eyes widened. “Oh. Okay, hold on, Cap.” The archer stepped forward just as Steve listed sideways, knocking Clint back half a step. “Yeesh, you’re heavy. Come on.” He slung his arm around Steve and started toward the bathroom door as Steve’s coughing got more frantic.

The bathroom door shut, and Tony and Natasha looked at each other.

“Kind of brave of Steve to go in there in the dark,” Tony finally remarked. “I think out of all the places and times I’d  _ least  _ want the power to go out—”

“Steve?”

The voice wasn’t Natasha’s, and Tony looked down in surprise. Bruce was blinking curiously and struggling to push himself up with shaking arms.

“Oh, that’s nice.  _ He’s  _ the one you recognize, not me—” Tony started, but Natasha cut him off.

“Nice to have you join us again, Doctor Banner. How’re you feeling?”

“Okay.” Lies. It was all lies, and Tony knew it when he saw Bruce’s eyes flick downwards. How that guy had ever survived being on the run from the government was beyond him. “Is everybody else—” He broke off to cough weakly into his elbow.

“Rogers is awake, as you saw,” Natasha said carefully. “And Thor’s still asleep. I assume you woke up when he was—”

“Shooting off lightning like a fireworks display,” Tony offered.

Natasha shrugged as Bruce’s eyes widened. “Sure, we can go with that.”

“I’ve always wondered,” Bruce remarked in a hoarse voice. “How  _ does  _ his body withstand that much electrostatic discharge?”

“Right?” Tony held up his hand for a high five that Bruce slowly returned as Natasha sighed.

“I’ve changed my mind, Stark, he’s all yours.” There was a hint of a grin on her face.

Tony clapped an offended hand to his chest—above the arc reactor, he’d learned his lesson about hitting the reactor itself the hard way—as Bruce turned back and forth between the two of them.

“Did I miss—” He coughed. “Sorry. Did I miss something?”

“Nothing to worry your pretty little head about,” Tony said briskly. “Now, as soon as the power comes back on, maybe we can—”

There was a sound like the popping of bedsprings as Thor stretched awake and into a sitting position, rubbing his eyes as he gazed around the dark room. His blanket sparked with either regular static electricity or the vestiges of his lightning storm, and a few seconds later, the ceiling lights shuddered back to life.

Tony let out a cheer even as he had to squint from the sudden flood of light. “Yes! Thor, I knew you were my new favorite Avenger.”

“ _ New  _ favorite?” Thor protested sleepily even as Natasha said, “You do remember he’s the one who caused the power to go  _ out  _ in the first place, right?”

“Hmm. That’s true.” Tony looked at Thor and shook his head. “Sorry, pal, guess you’re back to number two.”

“Who’s number one? And please don’t say yourself,” Bruce said, and Tony was about to grin at him when Thor stared up at the underside of the bunk above him and frowned.

“I feel like something is off,” he said. “I was having some very strange dreams, and now everything is—” He cut himself off with a groan and lay back down, flinging an arm over his eyes. “—spinning.”

“Yeah, I’m not surprised,” Natasha said. She stood up and walked over to Thor’s bed, stopping when she was still a good distance away. Tony saw her glance quickly at Mjolnir. “Things were a little crazy in here a few minutes ago.”

Thor stared at her for a long, puzzled, moment before he followed her gaze to the hammer—which was still glowing with the occasional spark, but at least it wasn’t levitating—and understanding passed over his face. He scrubbed a hand down the back of his neck in a ridiculously apologetic way. “I see. That has not happened in… a long time, especially not by accident. Mjolnir is supposed to channel my power and prevent something like that—”

“It’s all right. Space viruses tend to mess with people’s heads.” Natasha gestured around at herself and Tony, and at the bathroom door that everyone was doing an adequate job of pretending they couldn’t hear the sounds from the other side. “I think I can speak for all of us when I say that nobody’s handled this with particular grace.”

“I feel like you were looking at me for an unfair amount of time when you said that,” Tony objected.

“Not everything is about you, Stark.”

“Does anyone remember that time an alien army was attacking New York and someone rode a nuke into a wormhole—”

The bathroom door was flung open, effectively cutting off the conversation. Especially since it was flung open by a Clint Barton who might want to ask S.H.I.E.L.D. for a raise after this and a Steve Rogers who looked exactly how you’d expect someone who’d been throwing up their guts for the past few minutes to look. 

Steve blinked around at the room that had been pitch-dark and relatively solemn the last time he’d been in it, that now was brightly—almost too brightly, wasn’t there a toggle for that sort of thing?—lit and full of awake people. Awake people tended to catch one off guard more often than sleeping people (with the notable exception of Clint, but that was because his preferred sleeping locations tended to include the ceiling vents, the top of the fridge, the roof, and probably other places he hadn’t been caught in yet), so it wasn’t surprising when Steve took a moment to comprehend them all before speaking. “Hi.”

Bruce waved from the bed. “Hey.”

Steve started to stagger back toward his bed, waving off Clint’s faked offer of help. He sat down heavily on top of the covers and rubbed his hands over his forehead, messing his hair even more. 

Then the captain realized he had an audience. “Uh, yes?”

Tony was the first to answer (practice). “Just wondering whether Fury’s gonna send me a bill or if the toilet is still functioning. Wouldn’t ask, except I doubt S.H.I.E.L.D. plumbing is any more capable than their idea of proper communication devices.” He could feel the four sets of assorted glares and eye rolls from the others, but he was good at ignoring that.

“Sorry about that. I just…” Steve gestured vaguely before visibly pulling himself into sitting up straighter, opening his eyes from where they had been sliding shut. “I’m fine. What’s going on?”

“What’s going on is that the last of the cough and fever medicine just went… “ Clint glanced at Steve before making an interesting hand motion accompanied by a  _ whoosh _ sound. “They stopped delivering it once the three of us were getting better, I guess they thought they could restock once we were all out of here.”

“ _ Are _ we ever going to be out of here?” Thor asked to no one in particular. 

“Don’t bother.” Everyone turned to Bruce, who was sitting cross-legged on his bunk. “I mean with asking them to deliver more medicine. Even full-grade tranquilizers do barely anything for me anymore, and I’m guessing the same is true for the two of you.” He pointed to Steve and Thor, the latter of which nodded and muttered something about “puny mortal chemicals.”

Clint raised his eyebrows at Steve. “So you weren’t gonna share that little detail with me, huh?”

Steve shrugged, the barest hint of a weak smile on his face. “Had to make you feel useful somehow.”

“Oh, that’s low, Captain.” How Clint managed to make “Captain” sound insulting was almost impressive. “Next time I’ll let you knock yourself out on the shower tiles, you just wait.”

“I’m sorry I missed that.” Natasha grinned, quickly turning it into a blank and innocent expression once Clint and Steve turned their gazes toward her. “But anyway, what do—”

She was cut off when Steve lurched forward again, coughing so hard he was nearly bent in half, and would definitely have fallen off the bed if Natasha and Clint hadn’t been so quick on their feet.

Tony had jumped up as well, even though he knew he wouldn’t have been able to reach the other side of the room in time. Sometimes, when he was surrounded by people who could lift buses and use phone lines as their personal tightropes, he forgot he wasn’t quite on that level. Which one would think he’d have learned after attempting to join the others in the gym that one time—emphasis on  _ one time _ .

“What was that about letting him knock himself out next time, Barton?” he asked instead, leaning against the wall next to Bruce’s bunk like that was what he had meant to do all along. Because no one could say he wasn’t carrying the team in terms of sarcastic remarks. “‘Cause that looks suspiciously like you are committing a helpful act. As crazy as that sounds.”

“Unfortunately, I’m discovering that that sorta thing comes with the superhero job description,” Clint said with an overdramatized eye roll as he let Steve, still coughing, fall back onto the mattress. “Now maybe you do some contributing yourself and tell us how to fix that.”

“Fix what? Cap?” Tony peered closer. “Nope, I’m pretty sure that overabundance of patriotism and righteousness has been incurable since the nineteen-somethings.”

Steve coughed again before drawing in a shuddering breath. “Nineteen eighteen,” he corrected before returning to his previously scheduled choking fit that only paused to prove Tony wrong on things. Damn super soldiers.

“So you’re admitting that you’ve been this way since birth?” Tony asked, because he couldn’t resist. This time Steve couldn’t draw breath long enough to answer, and that’s when Tony felt an actual jolt of worry somewhere in the chest region. It didn’t make sense, this was just a cough and he knew it, but he had also seen the readings from the tests and everything they already knew about the alien virus, and knew it had the potential—not even potential, was there a word more definite than potential?—to get much worse. “Okay, we’ll put that on hold. Anyway, Barton, to answer your question: no, I can’t fix that because I am not a doctor and I have never cured anyone of a space disease before—and I guarantee everyone in this room that whatever joke you were about to make, I’ve already thought of it, so don’t even bother—so while I’m going to do everything I possibly can, I’m not the one you should be going to for this.”

Apparently the others hadn’t quite been expecting that, as he was stared at for a couple more seconds than he’d expected before everyone’s eyes slowly swung over to Bruce.

Tony turned as well, bracing himself for the usual “I’m-not-that-kind-of-doctor” ridiculousness that hadn’t stopped him any of the dozens of times (actually, he wouldn’t be surprised if they were approaching the hundreds) after a mission when nobody had wanted to go to S.H.I.E.L.D. Medical and beelined for him with their dislocated shoulders and bleeding gashes and toxic sludge burns, because Bruce Banner was just that type of guy you wanted to have around.

Only now, Tony was stopped short when his eyes fell on Bruce and realized that he was slumped over on the bed, either having fallen asleep sitting up or was for sure most of the way there. His eyes were closed and his head had dropped against his shoulder.

“It appears we’re running out of geniuses,” Natasha observed quietly, the ends of her mouth tilting upward. There was a thunking sound as Steve let himself fall sideways on his bed, breathing in short, measured, gasps in a way that suggested he was familiar with it.

“I’m surprised he was even able to fall asleep with all of you making noise,” Tony said to the room in general as he pushed himself off of the wall to crawl onto the bunk. “Really, I don’t know if any of you are even capable of  _ reserved _ , but I guess Fury didn’t hire you for your bedside manners.”

“Ah, yes. My trademark. Noise,” Clint said reflectively at the same time Steve muttered, “This is coming from  _ you? _ ” in a voice that sounded like it had been dragged across gravel.

“Everybody do me a favor and stop talking,” Tony said. “Most of you for the obvious reasons and Rogers because he sounds like a piece of antique furniture. Thor is excluded because I’m not looking now but I’m still pretty sure he’s asleep again.”

“That is correct,” Natasha reported. “Bruce isn’t, though.”

“What?” Tony turned back to Bruce to see him lift his head, blinking confusedly at the scene around him. There were red marks on his face where the lines of his shirt had pressed into his cheek. “Huh. Sorry we woke you up.”

Bruce shook his head, still squinting at the light. “No, I shouldn’t have fallen asleep in the first place. I’m the only one here with—” He broke off as he failed to stifle a yawn “—medical experience.”

“Well, from what I can tell, even the medically experienced are having trouble handling this, so we’re all pretty much in the same boat.” Natasha shrugged, her voice drier than anything.

Tony felt his fist clench and stood up abruptly. Every eye in the room—every open eye, that is, which was admittedly fewer eyes than usual—flicked to him. “You know what? No.”

“No?” Clint repeated, his eyebrows raised. “Something tells me the little alien bacteria aren’t gonna listen to you.”

“Bacteria and viruses are two different—” Bruce started hoarsely, but Tony interrupted. He was pacing the room now, turning on his heel when he reached the wall and tapping his fingers through the air like he was solving an equation. Which he was. Several of them, in fact. 

“I’ll make them listen. Because I’m done. Right? I’m done watching all of this.” With a few gestures, Tony indicated Steve, Bruce, Thor, and the room in general. “I’m finding a cure. That’s a—I don’t want to say ‘promise,’ ‘cause I am notoriously bad at those, so I’m just going to say it. I will find one.”

Clint gave a nod and Bruce whispered something that Tony couldn’t quite make out, but Natasha was the one who stood up as well, lifting her head. “You know I’m in,” she said, and Tony felt his shoulders lower ever so slightly. “Got any ideas for step one?”

“As a matter of fact—” Tony stopped pacing when he reached the table and scooped up one of the tablets, both of which were still pinging with notifications even a good fifteen minutes after the power had been turned back on. He pressed the power button to be greeted with an “Incoming Call” screen. It didn’t say from who, but he could make an educated guess.

Natasha grinned and headed over for the other tablet, murmuring something like “this I gotta hear.” Clint had stood up and was talking to Bruce, who seemed to be forcing his eyes to remain open. Steve had already lost that battle and was lying limply on his own bunk. Thor, of course, was still asleep, but at least he was lightning-free. For now.

_ In my opinion, that just makes finding a cure even more important. _

Tony swiped a line across the tablet screen and held it up to his face, which was already prepared with a practiced insouciant smile. 

“Hey, Nicky. How’s your night going?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	9. That's On You

“JARVIS, is this the last file for these antibodies?”

“It is indeed, Agent Romanoff. And might I add that it is nice to be referred to by my name.”

“Well, ‘creepy ceiling voice’ was getting old. And inaccurate, since you aren’t in the ceiling anymore. Yet—I’m sure Tony’s working on it.”

“Regardless, it is much appreciated.”

“You hear that, J, we’ve converted another one!”

“I will throw this at you, Stark.”

* * *

“Hey, Bruce.

“Bruce.

“Bruce Banner.

“Brucebrucebrucebrucebrucebruce.

“ _ Bruce _ . Not that your silence isn’t really really helpful, but can you just tell me quick if the second diagram should be counted as one of the inactive—oh. Never mind, you can stay asleep.”

* * *

“I don’t use this kind of language often, but…  _ yikes _ .”

“This temperature is not so high for Asgardians. Besides, I have faced—faced worse—”

“Excuse you.”

“I apologize, just—I need a—”

“Hey, it’s okay, man. Let it out.”

* * *

“Do you know what time it is?”

“I’m sensing a rhetorical question.”

“You seem pretty sure of that. Maybe I actually, genuinely, want to hear you tell me the time. See if that genius is all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Well, in that case, I’d have to tell you that I have no fucking clue what time it is, like you already knew. And if you’re here to try to get me to go to sleep, I’ve got some new places you can shove your arrows—”

“Relax. I’m just giving you this.”

“Did—did you just  _ throw a pillow at me? _ ”

“I’ve got good aim. Would be a shame to waste it. And it’s been eighteen hours—in case you were wondering.”

* * *

“Okay, Cap, this will be over soon, I just need you to sit up for another second so we can get the—no, no, damn it—vertical, I need you to be vertical—shit—”

“Mmm.”

“Cap, come on, I know you can do this, you’ve fought Nazis and dinosaurs and aliens, this is just a little—god, how are you so heavy—”

“Tony…?”

“Yep. Now can you sit up?”

* * *

“And if we eliminate the connection on the second strand and target the protein bindings—”

“Tony, you’re talking out loud again.”

“Right.”

* * *

“JARVIS, when was the last time any of them ate?”

“Shall I assume you are referring specifically to the members of the Avengers who are currently incapacitated by the virus, sir? Because if not, Agent Barton is eating a grilled cheese at this moment—”

“No, no, you know what I meant. Quit being a smartass, I’m trying to work here.”

“Apologies, sir. I believe the last time was nine hours ago, when Doctor Banner attempted to drink a glass of water. Unfortunately, he was unable to keep it down. The time before that was when Captain Rogers—”

“Okay, I get the picture… Damn. I gotta get this thing working.”

“It has been several days—”

“Believe me, J. I know.”

* * *

There was a notification on the side of the screen. Really, it had been there getting ignored for about two hours now, flicked to the side almost the moment it had popped up because there were  _ more important things than checking every email  _ and it had become a reflex at this point, but Tony was stuck in a wallow of nothing new coming in and all of his ideas being instantly swallowed into dead ends, so what the hell.

He clicked on it, opening up one of the typical email formats used by S.H.I.E.L.D. and letting his eyes scan over the obligatory headings and business type, his finger hovering over the button to close out, when he spotted something that made him stop dead.

_ Holy shit. _

He immediately went back and started reading the email from the beginning, nodding faster and faster with every word. “Yes yes yes yes yes yes—” When he’d reread it for the fifth time, he actually stood up from his chair, already pulling up new tabs for every word of the email. “Yes!”

He didn’t realize he’d said that aloud until Natasha raised her eyebrows at him from where she sat across the table, not pausing from her own ceaseless typing. “Good news?”

“Like you would not believe. Hopefully. If it all works. It probably won’t work. No, I can’t talk like that, I’ll jinx it. It  _ should _ work, but even the fact that they were sure enough to send it—” Tony looked at Natasha. “Wait. Did you see the email from—” he swiped a few of his tabs away and peered at the screen to double-check “—Agent Baehre?”

“It’s Bay-ree, and no, I’ve been a little busy.” She flashed her screen quickly at him before turning it back toward herself; like his own, it was full of huge blocks of text and jargon. “Was it the theory about the microproteins?”

Tony didn’t bother with asking her why she was so sure this was about the cure—very few things would have made him this excited, not when it had been hours since his fingers had left the screen and even longer since he’d been within a foot of a bed, unless it was a call from Rhodey (who was overseas somewhere and panicking less now that Tony personally was no longer infected) or Pepper (who was in Malibu and panicking exactly the same amount), and unfortunately S.H.I.E.L.D. liked to screen those calls. “No, it was the other one—you know, the one about the residual antibodies and how if given the proper stimulation could—”

“I thought you said that one probably wouldn’t work.”

“Well, you know me: humility’s one of my greatest downfalls.”

“What’s going on over here?” Clint appeared from… somewhere, leaning on the back of Natasha’s chair to peer over her shoulder. “And is it important enough to wake me up?”

“It’s three in the afternoon, you weren’t asleep.” Natasha shrugged him off the back of the chair.

“I was trying to be before you guys went and ruined it,” Clint said at the same time as Tony said, “It’s three in the afternoon already?”

Natasha’s eyes flicked back and forth between the both of them before angling her tablet up to show Clint. “Here, look at this and decide if it was worth waking up for.”

Clint frowned down at the screen for a few moments, his eyes moving back and forth, and Tony was ready with a simplest-terms explanation, but instead Clint just finished reading and looked up. “Huh. And that’ll work?”

“You understood that?” Tony blurted out. Not that he was being mean or anything, but this was the same man who had asked with a straight face whether coconuts counted as mammals. “Thought it was a little above your pay grade, no offense.”

Clint clapped a hand over his chest. “Hey, I’m not just a pretty face, you know.” He let his hand fall back down to his side. “Also Natasha had me help go over the data as much as I could while you were asleep.”

Tony blinked. “When was I asleep?”

“Day before yesterday.”

_ Day before…  _ “I legitimately have no memory of that.”

“I’m sure your robot will show you the photos if you ask nicely.”

“JARVIS is not a ro—”

“What is everyone talking about?” Everyone’s heads turned to find Thor sitting up in his bunk gingerly, stretching his arms behind his head. “And so loudly?” He squinted up at the light and raised a hand to halfheartedly shield his eyes. 

Tony looked quickly at Natasha before turning back to Thor. “We’ve… hmm. We’ve got some news. Some very recent news that S.H.I.E.L.D. just sent and I actually feel like all of you should hear at the same time, as much as I don’t want to wake them up—”

“No need.” Steve didn’t sit up, but his eyes were open (well, mostly) as he lay hidden underneath a sheet, looking like even those two words were costing him. “I’m already awake. An’ Bruce…” He gave a barely perceptible jerk of the head in the direction of the bed across the room. 

Tony followed his gaze to Bruce’s bunk, where its occupant was shifting around before lifting his head out from under the blanket. Despite this, he looked like he hadn’t slept in a month. “Huh?”

“I guess that makes things easier, then,” Tony said. He paused, his fingers running back and forth over the curved top of his chair. “Is everyone okay?” That was asked in a much quieter tone of voice, but there wasn’t a single person in the room who didn’t hear it, judging from the sudden stillness and refusal to make eye contact.

“We’re—” Steve started, but Clint interrupted, swinging himself away from the table and walking over to the counter for absolutely no reason that Tony could conceive. 

“There’s no point to even asking, Stark, we’ve all seen the tests. And seen it up close. We know no one’s  _ okay _ .”

“And like any of you masochistic idiots would tell us the truth anyway,” Natasha murmured under her breath. “You’re all the same, everyone in this business is.”

Clint pointed at her. “And that. Just get on with it and tell them already before I do.”

Tony stopped tapping. “Well, since you asked so nicely.” He turned away from the others and reached down to grab his tablet. “This doesn’t need to be a long explanation; if anyone wants details later I will gladly oblige, but since Banner seems to be having trouble keeping his eyes open for longer periods of time—by which I mean longer than four seconds—I’m guessing the rest of you should be fine with the basic rundown… there’s a cure.”

He waited for it to sink in, which didn’t take long at all because—like he’d said—it wasn’t a long explanation. Or any explanation at all, in fact, which he should probably amend now that he’d gotten the big headline out of the way.

“There are some… technicalities,” he admitted, and almost in unison Steve’s, Bruce’s, and Thor’s shoulders seemed to slump. “Just routine things, testing equipment and proper dosages and so forth… and I guess the main one is that we don’t actually  _ have  _ the cure yet.”

Tony realized the moment the words were out of his mouth that  _ maybe  _ he should’ve phrased that a little differently, but by that point everyone had already exploded into various stages of loud confusion. Even Natasha was looking at him sideways.

“Why would you—tell us this if it’s not—not even true?” Steve asked, forcing the words out through vocal cords that had had enough, raising his head a half inch off the pillow before deciding it wasn’t worth it and lowering it back down.

“No, you’re not getting it,” Tony said, waving his hands in the universal gesture for “cut it out” in an attempt to regain the team’s attention span. “We do have the cure, as in the knowledge of how a cure should work, all right? It’s still a theory at this point, that’s all I meant; an actual antidote to the virus would need to be synthesized after further testing, which, ah, brings us to another one of our technicalities…”

Thor interrupted before he could finish the rest of the sentence. “If you don’t have it yet, then how can you be sure it will work?”

“Because look at this.” Tony walked over to the side of Thor’s bunk, avoiding the messy pile of blankets that had been shoved off the side when his fever had evidently gotten to be too much to bear. He held out the tablet to Thor, and when he didn’t take it, stabbed a finger at a word in the middle of the screen himself. “The scientists and doctors, the ones who’ve been working on this longer than we have, they said this theory was viable.” He waited expectantly for the “oh, of course, I see now, I should have known,” but this  _ was  _ Thor he was talking to. The guy still tried to play off the last time he’d lost at Mario Kart by claiming that he’d been given a “faulty controller” and that on Asgard they would “simply use actual chariots.”

Now Thor narrowed his eyes at the screen before turning his head to Tony. When he was sitting on the bed and Tony was standing next to him, they were closer to eye level than Tony would’ve liked. “Is that good?”

Tony let out a breath. “Point Break, coming from these bureaucratic sticks-up-their-asses, ‘viable’ is practically a gold star.” He slid the tablet back under his arm.

“Wait a second.” Everyone turned to look at Bruce, who was attempting to prop himself up on his pillow. He coughed, whether out of nervousness or alien disease, and continued. “What was the other technicality, Tony?”

_ Right. There was that… little detail. _

Tony rocked his foot back and forth on the floor for a moment before answering. “We can’t do further testing.”

This time, instead of arguing, the others just stared at him. Besides Clint, who he was pretty sure he heard mutter “what the  _ fuck _ ” before resuming his position of silently lurking in the corner of the food area.

So Tony launched into the explanation. “Basically, everybody who got infected when the slime alien first showed up—me, Nat, Legolas, any random civilians and S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who were poking around—they’re all already recovered, most of them have been for weeks.”  _ Besides the fatalities, but if they don’t already know about those, I’m not going to tell them. _ “The only new cases after that were caused by people getting it transmitted to them through contact with the slime—mostly S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, because you know their favorite thing when a mysterious and dangerous object from space shows up at their doorstep is to play with it—and even those have had it pass through their system by now. And the alien carrier itself is long gone thanks to the Asgardian Monster Collection Service.”

Natasha crossed her arms. “So you’re saying—”

“The only people who are still infected are in this room right now.” Tony gestured around to Steve, Bruce, and Thor, all of whom had gone very still. “So there aren’t a whole lot of options for ‘further testing’ anymore.”

There was a silence that might even have stuck if Clint hadn’t spoken up from his lurking corner. His voice was thick with sarcasm. “Anything else we should know about this miracle cure? Are you next gonna say we’re gonna have to use these guys as the lab rats?”

Tony stared very intently at a burn mark that scored the wall next to him, a relic of Thor’s little light show. It was almost shaped like the Grand Canyon, if he tilted his head ever so slightly.

“Tony.”

Fuck, that was Steve. He would’ve been able to ignore anyone else perfectly fine, but even though Steve’s voice was thready and weak and nowhere near his usual commanding captain tone, he still couldn’t help but acknowledge it. 

“Well,” he said. “I did say there was no option for further testing.” That wasn’t good enough, he knew it, and he knew it would probably just make this whole thing worse, but he didn’t think there was anything he  _ could  _ say at this point that any of them would find the slightest bit reassuring.

“So you’ll skip right to giving it to one of them and seeing what happens?” That was Natasha, crossing the room and stopping parallel to the other end of Thor’s bunk, a short distance away from where Tony had slanted himself against the wall.

_ What?  _ “Actually—” Tony started, but he was interrupted by Bruce (of all people—apparently everyone was getting their turn today).

Bruce’s voice was raspy but determined as he glanced from the blanket twisted in his fist to the rest of the team. “I’ll do it.”

Tony felt his breath give an odd skip. “Bruce—”

Bruce shook his head, a slow, exhausted motion. “No, it’s—it’s the option that makes the most sense if you think about it.” The arm that was propping him semi-upright gave out and he sunk back against the pillow.

“That’s ridiculous,” Natasha said bluntly.

Steve nodded, a shaky hand reaching out to grip around the bunk above him and pull himself up. “If anyone’s going to volunteer themselves for testing it’ll be me.” He ended up needing both hands, but he remained sitting up, the intensity in his eyes making Tony realize why maybe World War II had ended with an Allied victory.

“Oh boy, here we go,” Clint muttered.

“No, it will not.” And that was Thor, struggling to kick the rest of his sheets off his bed so he could stand up. “I’m the strongest Avenger, and I will not allow one of you to put yourselves at risk when I could prevent it.”

“Bullshit—” Steve started, but was overtaken by a sudden coughing fit that had him bent nearly double.

Bruce raised his voice slightly, practically forcing his eyes to stay open. “Honestly, guys, I wasn’t offering to be funny; I meant I’m doing it. I’m the only one who understands the science… and besides, this is kind of my thing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, how well did that work out for you before?” Clint asked, but Thor was already snapping his head toward Bruce.

“That is hilarious that you should say that, because out of everyone here, I’m the only one who actually knows a thing or two about ‘aliens,’ so if you’re going to—”

Steve choked out a breath. “Shut up, I’m doing it—no one has a problem—” He took in another gasp. “—a problem listening to my calls in the field, so there’s no reason why that should—should change now—”

“We’re not  _ in _ the field,” Natasha pointed out. “And we make decisions as a team, Rogers.”

Steve opened his mouth to answer but started coughing again, harsher than before, and Tony was over at the side of his bunk before he knew what he was doing.

In the background he could hear Natasha exclaim something and Thor’s deep voice asking what was happening, could the captain breathe, but from this close his ears were filled with the sound of Steve gasping for breath. His hand scrabbled around on the mattress, bumping into Tony’s before he pulled it back to his chest, still coughing.

“Is anybody going to be useful or do I have to figure this out myself?” Tony asked without turning around, his mind already churning with everything he’d ever heard that could possibly be useful in a situation like this but Steve’s stupid super soldier self was apparently immune to cough medicine and he couldn’t see him even being able to drink water right now without choking.

He finally turned his head just as Bruce jolted awake from whatever five-second nap he had just been taking. “You’re the doctor here—help?”

Bruce frowned at Steve—or what he could see of him from across the room, probably—and started mumbling something, but every other word was either too quiet to hear or just plain unintelligible. The scientist’s eyes were drifting shut even as he spoke. 

Tony didn’t have time to worry about that, though, because suddenly Natasha was there and yanking Steve upright from where he had fallen sideways on the bed, curled up like a potato bug. 

“He should sit up,” she said by way of explanation, and her and Tony together were able to get Steve into a sitting position against the wall, waiting for a few moments before the coughs finally tapered out.

Steve took a shaky inhale, his hand drifting to the center of his chest seemingly unconsciously. “That’s one thing I don’t miss,” he said in a voice that was all but gone. “Asthma.”

Thor made a “hmph”-type sound from his own bunk. “And this is why I should be the one to test the cure; the two of you are clearly in no condition—” He tried to stand up and swayed dangerously, catching himself just in time on the side of the bed.

“ _ Clearly _ ,” Clint repeated.

Bruce was huddled in a ball under his own blankets and nearly all the way asleep again, but he shot a look at Thor that reminded Tony of the Hulk on a very, very good day and whispered something angry that absolutely nobody in the room heard. Tony felt the mattress shift underneath him and realized that Steve was moving too, already raring to go.

_ That’s it. _

Tony pushed himself to his feet in one movement and was standing on the coffee table before anyone else could say a single new argument. “ _ Guys _ ,” he announced, and finally, finally, everybody was silent.

Silent and staring at him, which was not unexpected considering he was standing on the coffee table, but he had to get his point across somehow and it wasn’t going to be lounging across Steve Rogers’s bed.

“Right,” he said after a moment. He could feel his heart pounding from behind the arc reactor, and he didn’t really even know why. “Can everybody just calm the fuck down for a minute? Can you do that? Because I do get it, honestly; a few weeks without any bad guys to fight and you’ve got the pent-up energy and whatever, but  _ chill. _ No one is going to be the test subject. That was never the plan, if anyone would let me finish a sentence around here.”

Clint looked like he had another snarky comment all queued up for that, but fortunately—and this was the only time Tony would ever call this a fortunate event—Steve interrupted.

“Tony, didn’t you just say that this was the only theory you found that might work?”

“I did say that,” Tony admitted. “That’s the only reason why I told you guys about it and why S.H.I.E.L.D. is even entertaining the idea of us using it—and I can already see the paperwork coming. But we can’t have one of you as a test subject because the doctors are going to have to use different dosages for all of you—in case you haven’t noticed, your physiologies are  _ batshit insane _ and whatever works for a giant rage monster isn’t gonna work for the god of sparkles. So, as of current, the plan is that we try and tailor the dosage to each of you separately, and then…” He shrugged and spread his hands. “Assuming everyone’s on board, of course.”

Steve nodded slowly. “I’m on board,” he rasped.

Thor closed his eyes for a moment before opening them again, the usual piercing blue bloodshot and darkened with shadows. “I as well.”

“Me too,” Bruce whispered.

“And I’ll help,” Natasha added. She wrapped her hands around her bent knee as she sat on the bed. “However I can—someone’s gotta do it.”

“I shall offer my assistance as well,” JARVIS’s voice echoed from the tablet. Tony had forgotten he’d left it on.

Everyone looked at Clint, who finally threw his hands in the air and stepped forward. “Well, if all the other Avengers were going to jump off a bridge—”

Tony smiled without any trace of humor. “Then let’s get rolling.”

* * *

It had taken time to synthesize the cure—time they didn’t have, or at least that the three still-infected Avengers didn’t have—but at least they were all conscious and vaguely aware of what was going on. Anyone might be a little caught off guard to suddenly find themselves being lowered into a medical chair with needles poised in front of their arms, after all, and when people as powerful as them got caught off guard, it didn’t tend to end well.

They had been taken to another room to administer the cure, and Tony hadn’t even had the chance to take in the experience of finally being  _ out  _ of that room before being herded into lines with Natasha and Clint and being disinfected to within an inch of their lives. His skin still stung and his hands were rubbed red when he touched them, but all that had been flung to the distant depths of his brain when he’d caught a glimpse of Steve and Bruce and Thor being taken into the test room, which was partitioned off with glass that he was now pressing so close against that his breath was starting to fog its clear surface.

He wiped it away and continued watching. He didn’t dare take his eyes away for a minute, to the point where they were starting to itch with not blinking. Natasha was standing next to him, and she wouldn’t have this problem—stupid S.H.I.E.L.D. training probably covered situations where you would need to stop blinking to avoid being hit with death gas or something. Clint was on her other side—and he never blinked anyway, so nothing would be different for him—

Tony gave himself a little shake.  _ Focus. Your team is in there.  _

And they were, three superpowered bodies lying limply on plastic-covered medical chairs that seemed too big for them—practically an impossible thought when considering this was Steve and Thor, but maybe anyone looked smaller than usual when they weren’t moving and their eyes were shut and their heads were lolled against their shoulders…

One of the clump of doctors who were also stationed in the viewing area peered down at their screen and said something to one of the others, who nodded and hurried to the side, speaking into their coms. Even S.H.I.E.L.D. doctors were fully equipped agents, apparently—and honestly, what else had he been expecting. 

The procedure (god, Tony hated the sound of that word) would be done almost completely remotely, to limit the risk of contamination to S.H.I.E.L.D. staff. That was one of the reasons, anyway. Tony could tell from the way they had positioned Bruce’s chair just-ever-so-far-enough-away from the other two that they were also worried about what the Hulk would do when they stuck a needle in him.

Which was straight up ridiculous, in his opinion—anyone looking at Bruce right now would be able to tell that he was barely in a position to keep breathing on his own, let alone transform.

Steve had already passed that point and was now wearing an oxygen mask that kept preventing his head from being able to flop forward onto his barely-moving chest. His eyes were shut and there was a little furrow in his brow like some part of him was awake and wondering what the hell he was doing here.

As for Thor, he appeared to be right on the edge of consciousness, his limbs shaking every so often and his face twitching in a way that made Tony whisper to JARVIS to double-check for the presence of emergency backup generators. He was coughing in his sleep, too: painful sounds that ended almost as quickly as they began, before his breathing would hitch again and it would start all over.

The sound of the head doctor’s voice slowly filtered through Tony’s ears; they had been speaking for a while, but the words that made him snap to attention were: “—and we will now be starting the procedure. It is eleven twenty-five.”

A switch was flipped or a button was pressed, and the machines on the other side of the glass whirred into action, swiveling so that the hypodermic needles at the end were pointed at the inside of each of their teammates’ forearms.

Tony didn’t realize he’d made a noise, but he must have, as Natasha’s hand came up to rest on his shoulder. When he glanced at her, he saw that her other hand was gripping Clint’s. The archer himself had his jaw set like he was trying to be in agent mode, but the dart of his eyes betrayed him.

The doctor’s smooth, even voice began a countdown.  _ What, are we launching a rocket now? _

_ They’re awfully small for rockets— _

“Three, two—”

Tony swallowed. Through the glass, he could’ve sworn he saw Steve open his eyes just a crack, his mouth moving to form the words  _ it’ll work. _

“One.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Next chapter will be the epilogue :)


	10. And Tying Up Loose Ends

**One Month Later:**

It was still snowing as Thor pushed open the door of Avengers Tower and let himself in; a white and icy flurry that settled on the collar of his jacket and blurred his vision where it caught on his eyelashes. He’d been glad to find out that Earth had weather like this too—his first few months here had been all brutal sunlight and sweat that made his usual armor a hindrance during missions, and not least because of the time the sun had reflected off his chestplate and blinded Captain Rogers just as he was hurling his shield.

He gave a halfhearted stomp on the mat to shake some of the slush off before letting himself in the elevator. The voice of Stark’s electronic companion—JARVIS—suddenly filled the small rectangular room.

“Welcome back, Thor.” JARVIS hesitated a bit on his name as always—it had taken a while to break the habit of only referring to the team by their honorifics, and of course Tony still liked to be called “sir.” “Will you be heading to the communal floor as usual?”

“I would indeed.” Thor felt the shudder as the elevator began to ascend, the lights blinking for each floor. He could’ve simply flown to the top, of course, but the wind did make it chillier the higher he flew, and besides, Tony had started threatening to charge him for window repair.

Not that he ever would’ve complied; it was Tony’s own fault for not putting a latch to open them from the outside.

Eventually—it was a tall tower—the lights stopped blinking and stayed steady on the number of the correct floor as the doors slid open.

He was greeted by the sounds of people talking animatedly, the smell of a just-opened box of pizza, a shout of laughter that was almost immediately followed by a loud  _ thud _ , melodramatic shrieking noises that were obviously coming from a TV, and the tail end of JARVIS announcing his arrival.

“Well, it’s about time!” Predictably, Tony’s voice was the first he heard; the man himself was stretched out across the entire couch with his feet on the other armrest, but he straightened up when he saw Thor come in. “And what took you so long—leave your hammer in your castle and had to go back to get it?”

“Traffic.” Thor grinned and stepped farther inside, discarding his heavy jacket on an armchair that also contained a fluffy parka, something black and folded, and a balled-up purple scarf. “Am I the last one?”

“Yes. Any later and we’d be kicking you out.” Tony grinned and waved him over. “Come on, don’t be a stranger.”

The others were also spread out in various locations of the room, most of them watching the TV, which was blaring something that seemed to be trying to fill up some quota for fake blood and bad gunshot sound effects. A pizza box lay open on the floor beside several others, steaming like it had just been opened even though most of the slices had already been taken. Outside, snowflakes blew against the window, covering most of the city from view.

“Oh, Thor’s here,” someone reported, and Thor looked for the sound of the voice before spotting Natasha curled on a loveseat, eating her own slice of pizza and paying absolutely no attention to the movie. “We can get the party started now.” Her mouth twitched with that last part.

“Finally? Thank God.” Steve grinned from where he was laying on his side on the floor, scribbling something in an open notebook. “Anything would be better than this…  _ this _ .” He gestured at the TV, which was now showing a car careening off the side of a cliff, an image completely at odds with the one previous, which had taken place in a rough approximation of a bar.

“You’re the one who suggested the rotating schedule.” Clint was upside down in an armchair, occasionally flipping himself upright to take another bite of pizza. “Now you gotta stick to it.”

“Besides, it’s not actually that bad,” Bruce offered from where he was sitting on the floor with his back pressed up against the couch. It was clear that he and Steve were only down there because it meant easy reach to the pizza box. “I don’t think so, anyway.”

Tony fell back dramatically against the couch. “I can’t believe you’re taking sides against me—that hurts, big guy, it really does.”

“No one was on your side to begin with,” Natasha pointed out. “You would’ve picked something that would’ve been equally as bad, but it just would’ve had a robot in it. That doesn’t make stuff better.”

“Clearly you haven’t seen enough movies,” Tony protested. “Besides, this one has a robot in it too. Right? The one who came alive and killed the housekeeper?”

“No, it was the woman from the bank. Remember, the one with the hair—”

“Right, right, right, right.”

“I think I would like to have a chance at this rotating schedule,” Thor said as he took advantage of Tony being temporarily distracted to claim a seat at the other end of the couch. “Who was it that picked this one?”

Four voices spoke in unison: “Clint.” Bruce pointed with his pizza slice.

“And now they’re ganging up on me…” Clint raised his eyes to the ceiling, which was easier than normal given how he was still upside down. “JARVIS, you’re keeping this on record, right?”

“All happenings at the Tower are kept on record, Mr Barton.”

“I kinda liked it better when you called me ‘Agent.’” Clint’s eyes suddenly went wide. “Wait, everybody shut up—this is the best part.”

Thor watched along with everyone else as what seemed to be a giant blender spun around and around on screen, tinny screams coming out of it. A second later, the screen changed to a scene of two men hiding in a bush.

“How can you tell?” Steve asked, and Clint narrowed his eyes at him.

“So this is what you’ve missed,” Bruce said quietly to Thor. “Just so you can make sure to be even later next time.”

“I don’t know.” Thor nodded at the TV screen. “As horrible as this is, Asgard at the moment has not been a wealth of enjoyment either.” Ever since everything with Loki, and Odin, and… yes, it was better to be on Earth for now. Besides, he was one of the Avengers, and they could be called out for a mission at any time. And after the events of the previous month, he definitely preferred to be there whenever something like that had a chance of happening again.

“Oh, so we’re your second choice.” Thor hadn’t even realized Tony had been listening. “Good to know next time we’re deciding seat order on the quinjet, Blondie.”

“There are Nine Realms,” Thor reminded him. “You’re lucky you all are my second choice.”

Bruce laughed and moved himself up onto the couch now that Tony was no longer taking up all of the space. He took the pizza box with him, causing Steve to lift his head with a wide-eyed look of betrayal before flipping his notebook shut and clambering up himself so that Bruce was pushed closer into Thor and Tony gave a strangled “hey!” as his feet were shoved off the edge.

“Is there a reason you felt the need to be up here?” Tony asked him with raised eyebrows. “Because again: billionaire. Tower. There’s probably like fifty couches on this floor alone.”

“There are thirteen, sir, not counting the six loveseats and one bean bag,” JARVIS responded almost immediately.

“Thanks, J.”

“You’re forgetting I grew up in the Great Depression,” Steve said with a grin. “We had to make do with what we had, which in some cases was—” He snagged one of the last slices of pizza from the box that now stretched across Thor’s and Bruce’s laps. The hot cardboard burned in a way that wasn’t exactly unpleasant. 

The rest of Steve’s words were lost as his mouth became full, but Tony continued like he had kept speaking. “In that case, why are the superspies over there wasting perfectly good chair space? Get over here, you— _ hey _ !”

Clint had climbed onto the back of the couch and was now perched there like some strange gargoyle, still keeping his eyes fixed on the movie. “Careful what you wish for, Stark.”

“One left,” Thor remarked, and everyone’s gaze flicked to Natasha, who was still lounging on her armchair across the room. She smirked when she noticed them all.

“Yeah, I’ll pass. I think I’ve had enough team bonding for one day.”

“Come on.” And that was Clint, of all people. “We’ve gotta see how many superheroes we can fit on this couch. It’s like a circus trick.”

_ There is no way that is going to work _ , Thor thought.

The next thing he knew, Natasha was sliding onto the other end of the couch, her legs draped over the armrest and scooting Tony over so that his shoulder bumped into Steve before he rearranged himself. Bruce was now practically forced into Thor’s lap, and neither Thor or Steve could move their heads without being worried about knocking Clint onto the floor. The couch itself wasn’t small, but it was now beginning to feel just a bit cramped.

Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, the Avengers had gotten pretty used to each other’s company.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! And thank you everybody who left kudos and/or comments while I was writing this! They were all wonderful and very much appreciated ❤️


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